JW Landscapes Chicago, IL Website Review

2010 will bring you various website reviews from Severity Design. Don’t worry…I’ll try and be as positive as possible. There IS a lot of crappy design out there, but I’m going to highlight both the good and bad aspects of the websites I’ll review in the hopes to give some “eye education” on what businesses need to know about attracting more clients. It’s one thing to have a website with text and pictures online, it’s another thing to utilize your website to the fullest and take full advantage of what’s available to you.

JW Landscapes (http://www.jwlandscapes.com/) is a landscape design company owned by John West in Chicago. The website is lacking in company information, but after another google search I found a short snippet about what the company actually does from Chicago Home Mag online.  Your website should at the very least tell us a little history about your company. Maybe a little about the owner, how long you’ve been in business, and here is the clincher: testimonials. In this case, if I was a first time customer visiting the website I may not make that “trust” connection with JW. Also, if you notice, none of the text is selectable. This is probably because the site is flash based and is not good for search engines.  Search engine spiders are hunting for useful information. I’m not aware that search engines are able to select images or flash images yet for search rankings. Colorwise, I love the choice. The green and khaki colors give me the earth tone feel that is appropriate for a landscape design company. When I load the website, this annoying music loads automatically. BIG NO NO. To their credit, they DO provide a on/off function to turn it off. But when I visit websites that force music, video or other things on me I usually go straight for the X button.

They have a very nice gallery of work. Very important to display photography of your work if you are in a service field that involves construction or products. I might suggest “before” and ”after” photos to let us know your particular contribution to the project.  Also I noticed in the gallery that when you click on the sub navigation categories instead of going straight to the photos it takes me to a “intro slide” that is kind of redundant.

Finally, I’d like to see a call to action either on the home page or somewhere in the site. What do you want your visitors to do? Maybe this could be displayed on the side left bar. The logo is very nice and professional, however you should always include your contact information in full view for visitors to convert to phone calls for business.

Overall, this is a very nice site. It’s very clean, simple and easy to find and navigate through.

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