Web Designing Firm - Review Website

[aurisstudio36]

Hi there,

Finally I have designed the website for my firm Auris Studio. I want your feedback on the design and working of my website. I also want one favour from you. I have developed a feature named "Estimate Price" that emails estimation on web designing. If you have a little free time, please test the feature. All feedback, either positive or negative are welcomed.

Link: Auris Studio's Official Website

Regards,

Arshad Ansari
Owner/ Developer
Auris Studio

[theone48]

The design is okay and things seems to work fine. I've no intention to use this service however so I did try the Estimate feature. I like your animation and vivid colors though.

[essellar]

Nice. I was a little surprised to see the logo change (and yes, I can still see the old logo at the bottom), but it works well. And I see you've taken the trouble to polish the copy for the business site too -- it'll stand up well. Especially at your market level. You could probably afford to go considerably higher before long if you can maintain that kind of quality with customer projects. I mean double the numbers and make it dollars instead of rupees -- all it takes is a track record, experience and a bit of confidence.

There is only one minor quibble, and that's the alignment of the add on your landing page. Center that, and you're golden. I'm not sold on the white-on-black on the front page, but that's just a particular prejudice I have; a lot of people seem to love the look even if I can't understand why. (I'm much more partial to the colour scheme you've got going on the rest of the site.) Chacun a son goût, as they say.

[theone48]

hmm, essellar you're not french, are you?

Oh right, Canada. they do speak french there.

[essellar]

Je suis bilingue, moi. My father's English and my mother's French.

[nirajkum]

site looks good ........ specially the graphics

[aurisstudio36]

Hi theone48,

Thanks for reviewing. I really appreciate that. I am happy you liked it. Actually i was wanting to test the estimate price feature. Unfortunately i didn't receive any email. If you have a little more time please submit it once again. Just write in the field "About your project" something like "testing" so that i know it is a test submit. Thanks again!!


Hi essellar,

I am feeling really really happy reading your review!! Thank you so much!!
As you advised about the copy, this time i took a lot of time in drafting the copy. And ya i have not used the actual logo in the header this time.
About the rupee sign, actually, my business is mostly confined to India and specially my state (due to payment problems, currently i dont have any payment gateway to recieve money from countries other than India). But i am thinking i would in a while upgrade the site, to show content according the the country of the users so that it would so respective currencies.
I have aligned the ad at the bottom to center... as you suggested. Thanks again!! your reviews always help me lot!!

Hi nirajkum,
Thank you so much for appreciating my work!

[essellar]

My point with the rupees vs dollars wasn't that you're using the "wrong" currency. There's nothing wrong with stating your prices in rupees.

It is pretty obvious that your target market is India and people used to the idea of dealing in south Asia -- and that's a great way to get enough initial clients to build an online portfolio of "live" examples of your work. (I would make sure that part of the agreement always allows you to link to the client site when you deal with a business, or at least that you can use screen shots on your own site.) If you can live on the income you get at those rates (it would be impossible to do that here in North America), you should be able to get a lot of work -- and in doing that, you will also build a toolkit (macros for your graphics programs, snippets of code, HTML boilerplate, CSS/LESS/SASS skeletons, and so on) that will allow you to work more quickly and more effectively. And that toolkit will make you more valuable, since you'll be able to translate your design ideas into reality a lot faster. (The actual design ideas should be the hard part.)

There are almost 50Rs to the dollar these days, so if you double the numbers and use dollars instead of rupees, you would be charging almost 100 times as much as you are now. And on the international market, that would still make you "cheap".* Cheap enough, in fact, that people would be suspicious of the quality they can expect -- but with a solid portfolio of real, live sites available for viewing, you can cut through the prejudices around outsourcing.† It won't be something you can do right away (that price would put you out of much of your local market) but it's certainly something to consider for the future.

_________________________
* A typical professional designer in western Europe or North America would charge at least ten times as much.

† It's not all about racial prejudice. There's a sort of "factory mentality" in many of the large outsourcing IT-related companies in India that discourages good practices and developer improvement. And to be completely honest, the schools are competing based on the number of people they can graduate rather than on the quality of their education, so there are a lot of people with computer science degrees who shouldn't be allowed anywhere near a computer (even to check their own email). I've worked with some marvelous small and independent Indian contractors, but my experiences with larger companies have never been good.

[xtreamco23]

What does the "theone48" mean "the design is okay..."? Your website rocks! I think your site is one of the best-looking websites here. It's beautiful and eye-catching. However, I do recommend you use JavaScript/jQuery/ASP instead of Flash (as some people still us IE or don't have Flash installed on their computer). Nonetheless, good work. I commend you.

[essellar]

Why ASP? It's just another server back-end (and not one of the "cool" ones, either, unless you're using F#). IE has nothing to do with it, really, since it's just another browser on the heap and doesn't care what the server is running (and IE users are more, not less, likely to be running Flash). That said, I don't run Flash in any of my browsers unless there's a really good reason to do so (I can whitelist a site, either permanently or temporarily) and this site stands up even without the Flash. It's being used properly, as an enhancement. Until all browsers support Canvas or the <video> tag, Flash is still the most appropriate technology for some things.