Thank you for all your feedback, I only designed the website with a table to divide the page horizontally into 3 sections, and the rest of the layout was done with divs. Like I said earlier I am new to this so I implement new design methods as I learn them.
When I first started with web design, I was teaching informal education seminars to students and was instructing them to use tables for layout. At the time, I didn't know better - and to beginning designers, tables make perfect sense because there is a 'physical' structure that you can visualize. All this to say, I don't fault beginners for using tables. I just try to instruct them that there is a better way.
I'll give you a crash course in search engine optimization, though. Doing these things will help search engines find your site easier, and help your clients get more web traffic (which is the point of having a website in the first place, isn't it?)
- Reduce bandwidth requirements
First, let's reduce bandwidth requirements.
Here is a speed test for your Residential page. First, you can see how using a .bmp file for your logo makes it "weigh" as much as all your other images except the ones in the slide show, combined. PNG, GIF, and jpeg are your best friends for hosting images online, there are almost no reasons to ever use bmp.
Next, though, is looking at how many images you're using: Using images for navigation, headings, and other pieces of information may not take up very much space, but when someone is viewing their website, they have to send requests to the server 18 different times. Things like that will add up - use web friendly fonts if you can.
Google web fonts are a nice alternative if the default web-friendly fonts seem to be getting stale. There are other reasons to use text instead of images, down below.
Also, make a favicon for your site. When google and other search engines are looking for it, if they don't find one then the server will direct them to a 404 page. This increases load times slightly, but also increases the cost of bandwidth to host your site.
- Use SEO friendly terms
There are a variety of ways that search engines like google will use to look at a site, to determine how relevant it is to a term someone may be searching for. The general process is this: Google will search for
relevant meta information, relevant heading information, relevant text, load time. Google wants to give you the quickest, most accurate,
most popular website based on what you are searching for.
By using images instead of <h1> tags, search engine's aren't able to see headings on your website.. so they have less of an idea of what your website is talking about. By not creating alt text for the images that you do have, they're not able to guess what your images are about, either. And by having an image for your phone number, they can't read what your business's phone number is, either.
This doesn't relate to the other two topics, but it takes forever to edit images - let's say the client wants a different font. Now you're stuck editing and uploading up to 10 images every time he asks you to change it. Ouch!
All of those things aside. The design is very well put together, good choice on colors and I think overall it just feels very appealing. The background seems so strong because you don't really see white anywhere else on the page, so I think it's pulling the viewer's eyes away from the rest of your content. I think you'll find that if you don't have a page background pattern and just kept it the same color as the rest of the page, that it wouldn't look bad at all.
