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URL: www.fwdtechgrp.com
Reviewed by: David Mead
Style Score (1-5) : 2
Screen shots:
Comments on the style:
The soft green text that "raises" out of the gradient light brown background is not striking enough even though it is large and is not helped by the shadowing. My browsers re-sized to 828 x 728 for some reason. By this I mean that no extra content was revealed. I would now have to scroll left to right if using an 800 x 600 resolution for no extra content (This only happens on the home page). The text on the buttons goes italic and squashes over the right of the screen when rolling over which makes it hard to read - In IE they jerkily scroll across, in Mozilla the just appear on the right-hand side. All of the text on the page is graphics and does not match the gradient background exactly.
The internal pages have a different navigation to the home page, but are then consistent throughout. Most of the content is bulleted lists, though some lists have a mixture of bullets. Not sure if this is meant to signify something. Other images used throughout the site have a white background and look odd against the gradient.
Overall not an eye-catching palette or design. The choice of font gives the site a "home-made" feel and it doesn't convey the technological nature of the company to the visitor.
Code Score (1-5) : 2
Screen shots (code) : 
Comments on the code:
This sites code has no DOCTYPE so it can't validate. No alt tags seem to be in use (making the homepage unusable to a screen-reader, browsing without images or search engines). This is a mixed table-based and DIV based layout, using a mixture of external, embedded and inline CSS styles. Some of the formatting is still being done with empty <p> tags and suffers from using the same class="" for every <li>, <h3> or <p> tag used.
Both IE and Mozilla show JavaScript errors on the internal pages. It doesn't affect the pages showing though.
Usability Score (1-5) : 2
Screen shots (code) :
Comments on the usability of the web site:
As the navigation is all images with no alt tags used I can see it being very difficult to use if these are switched off or if using a screen reader. Big lists of information don't convey why I should choose one phone over the other, especially as I have to scroll down to find the descriptions of each product. Moving the description above the fold with links to an individual page for each product would help I feel.
General Score (1-5): 2
Comments:
With the long lists and hardly any descriptive text to lead in to each page there doesn't seem to be any call to action or reason why I should use this company over others. A lack of eye-catching images of the products on the main pages (they are in pop-ups) doesn't help, nor does the muted palette.
