Rate Our New Hosting Site

[alex042]

We've just brought a new hosting site online in time for Halloween and would like to get some reviews so we can tweak it before sending out any mass promotions. Any constructive comments appreciated.

http://www.estatehosting.com/
or
http://www.estatehosting.net/

[bradley]

I think the pixeled background is distracting. Also, just glancing at the picture of the house & the caption below it, I thought I was on a real estate site. I see now that you're toying w/ the word "site". Make sure it is clear to your visitors.

The calendar is neat, but does it really have a purpose?

The Flash navigational buttons are hard to read. Try making the text larger.

Your hosting plan comparison table is as complex and unfriendly as mine! :) I'd suggest only including the important things. OR... create a list at the bottom of all the things that all plans contain and only list the rows separately where one plan has a feature that another one doesn't have.

I don't like the "Leave Message" image - especially in red. That's the first place my eyes went to (after seeing the house!).

You can get a better graphic of Atlas.

Overall, it is a good customization of Postnuke. If you change a
few things, it will be better.

[alex042]

I think the pixeled background is distracting. Also, just glancing at the picture of the house & the caption below it, I thought I was on a real estate site. I see now that you're toying w/ the word "site". Make sure it is clear to your visitors.
The pixeled background is a part of this particular postnuke theme. I'm not sure what I can do about that. I'll have to look into that.

As for the house, I was trying to bring the 'home' page theme into the page with the picture. I already have the plans named after this theme as well as the servers, but it sounds like I'll have to do some rethinking on a possible better solution to obtain this theme visually. Btw, you probably never saw another theme I was working with that was an actual real estate theme. ;)
The calendar is neat, but does it really have a purpose?
The calendar module is there to help keep customers informed of notices among other things so hopefully it will prove to be useful.
The Flash navigational buttons are hard to read. Try making the text larger.
I'll have to check into the theme to see if this is possible. I noticed that some computers may not have the font that it wants which could cause it to appear slightly different on some computers.
Your hosting plan comparison table is as complex and unfriendly as mine! I'd suggest only including the important things. OR... create a list at the bottom of all the things that all plans contain and only list the rows separately where one plan has a feature that another one doesn't have.
I wasn't sure how to approach this so I've seperated standard features from features specific to each plan so hopefully these stand out a little better. I think I still may want to do a little more tweaking on this. Maybe adding some house pictures to bring in the theme, but not sure how I want to go about doing this to avoid confusion.
I don't like the "Leave Message" image - especially in red. That's the first place my eyes went to (after seeing the house!).
The red should be easy enough to fix. I'll pull the graphic back up and tweak that some. There's actually another live help button for customers that are logged in also for tech support.
You can get a better graphic of Atlas.
You don't like my custom logo? :eek: Actually, that originated from a photo of an actual Atlas statue I dug up from somewhere, but I wanted it simplified for reproduction and branding purposes so I converted it into a 3 color logo. I had thought about bringing out a 3rd diminsion to make the globe more 3d, etc but haven't had time yet.
Overall, it is a good customization of Postnuke.
I'm glad someone thought this because we plan on hitting that market with some of our script installations. If there's anything else let me know.

[noncompare]

It's a nice implementation of a Nuke site. A lot of people already get turned off by the cookie-cutter nature of a Nuke site, but you do yours very nicely...

[alex042]

It's a nice implementation of a Nuke site. A lot of people already get turned off by the cookie-cutter nature of a Nuke site
Thanks. I played with the idea of a static site like many other hosts, but decided nuking it might be more appropriate for a host who offers script installation.

I believe the theme version you saw was one of the non-flash versions. Due to some issues noted here regarding the flash theme as well as from WHT comments, we've decided to test out a non-flash version.

[hostthebest]

you got some problem with mySql no page show up now

[alex042]

Yep, I noticed that. It was just working the other day before some things just quit working, but it should be back up now after upgrading cpanel and rebuilding apache. This issue was evidentially due to php being downgraded to 4.2.2 which doesn't seem to support mysql and was resolved after php was brought back up to 4.3.3 as it was before the change. I'm not sure if this was a cpanel auto upgrade issue or not, but I've temporarily disabled auto update so hopefully things don't just mysteriously break for a while.