Looking for some constructive criticism. Website

Nice setup. Good colours.
It doesn't say the area you serve.
I would like the font for the top buttons to be a bit heavier.
I found the large pics took time to load and change over. A bit too large on my iPad.
I like the layout and feel. Also the quotes are great.
 
Hi Mike,
I used to be a high school English teacher, so I love giving suggestions for improving websites, especially in the wording area. So here goes:

I like the background images.
"Stewards of the Garden" is hard to read. The white letters disappear.

From the first page and image, I can't tell what you DO. Prune? Remove? Treat? "Trees are what we DO"?? What does that mean?

I like the top right, with your service area and live link. But what if I want to call you? Add your phone number right up there, big and bold.

"We strive to treat every Tree and their person with all the dignity and respect that they deserve." This sentence is strange to me. It personifies trees (why is "tree" capitalized), and implies they have an owner/partner?

Bottom of the page images: well, they are pretty trees. But are they yours? I recognize some of them from searching for tree images on-line. Are they copyrighted? Better to check. Also, I'm not sure what purpose they serve. They are just nice trees. Wouldn't it be better if they actually connected to something, like perhaps your own photo album? Or your "Services" page??

"About Us" page:
The words you credit to Chief Seattle weren't spoken by him. I'm just saying. Check Snopes.com

So I'm still trying to figure out what you DO to trees. The second sentence says: "His love and commitment can be seen in the work that he does, making sure all his efforts are to produce the highest level of service for the tree and the client." This doesn't tell me what you DO.

From my years of teaching students how to write essays, I'd say I'm still looking for your thesis statement. It should be in the first sentence -- on both the home page and this page. People are impatient.

Ahh! "Rest assured that you’ll only have knowledgeable staff maintaining the trees on your property." You maintain trees? How? (BTW "youll" needs an apostrophe."

The following paragraph is nice info for a blog or book, or maybe in a link "Tree Facts." But as a business, it says nothing about your services. [Trees serve to beautify our landscape while playing an important part in our overall environment. Did you know that a mature tree can actually absorb dust similar to an air filter, while recycling carbon dioxide into oxygen? A single large tree removes about 25 pounds of carbon dioxide from the air each day, and in the process of photosynthesis, releases about 12 pounds of oxygen.]

"Services"
AHH. Here it is. Third page in.

"Wether your tree is 200ft tall or 8 ft tall, ArborSolutions can help. We offer maintenence pruning, corrective pruning and structural pruning. We are here to buffer the human arboreal interface."

"Whether" misspelled
200-ft. or 200 ft. or 200-foot
"maintenance" misspelled
That last sentence makes no sense to me (the wife of a tree service owner). It's jargon. Put it into everyday language.

"Unfortunately all good things must come to an end. whether your tree is dead, sickley, or its the wrong tree in the wrong place, ArborSolutions can safely remove your tree."

Whether needs a capital W.
"sickly" misspelled

I hope this helps. And that you aren't offended. You did ask. :-)

Judy
 
[ QUOTE ]
Hi Mike,
I used to be a high school English teacher, so I love giving suggestions for improving websites, especially in the wording area. So here goes:

I like the background images.
"Stewards of the Garden" is hard to read. The white letters disappear.

From the first page and image, I can't tell what you DO. Prune? Remove? Treat? "Trees are what we DO"?? What does that mean?

I like the top right, with your service area and live link. But what if I want to call you? Add your phone number right up there, big and bold.

"We strive to treat every Tree and their person with all the dignity and respect that they deserve." This sentence is strange to me. It personifies trees (why is "tree" capitalized), and implies they have an owner/partner?

Bottom of the page images: well, they are pretty trees. But are they yours? I recognize some of them from searching for tree images on-line. Are they copyrighted? Better to check. Also, I'm not sure what purpose they serve. They are just nice trees. Wouldn't it be better if they actually connected to something, like perhaps your own photo album? Or your "Services" page??

"About Us" page:
The words you credit to Chief Seattle weren't spoken by him. I'm just saying. Check Snopes.com

So I'm still trying to figure out what you DO to trees. The second sentence says: "His love and commitment can be seen in the work that he does, making sure all his efforts are to produce the highest level of service for the tree and the client." This doesn't tell me what you DO.

From my years of teaching students how to write essays, I'd say I'm still looking for your thesis statement. It should be in the first sentence -- on both the home page and this page. People are impatient.

Ahh! "Rest assured that you’ll only have knowledgeable staff maintaining the trees on your property." You maintain trees? How? (BTW "youll" needs an apostrophe."

The following paragraph is nice info for a blog or book, or maybe in a link "Tree Facts." But as a business, it says nothing about your services. [Trees serve to beautify our landscape while playing an important part in our overall environment. Did you know that a mature tree can actually absorb dust similar to an air filter, while recycling carbon dioxide into oxygen? A single large tree removes about 25 pounds of carbon dioxide from the air each day, and in the process of photosynthesis, releases about 12 pounds of oxygen.]

"Services"
AHH. Here it is. Third page in.

"Wether your tree is 200ft tall or 8 ft tall, ArborSolutions can help. We offer maintenence pruning, corrective pruning and structural pruning. We are here to buffer the human arboreal interface."

"Whether" misspelled
200-ft. or 200 ft. or 200-foot
"maintenance" misspelled
That last sentence makes no sense to me (the wife of a tree service owner). It's jargon. Put it into everyday language.

"Unfortunately all good things must come to an end. whether your tree is dead, sickley, or its the wrong tree in the wrong place, ArborSolutions can safely remove your tree."

Whether needs a capital W.
"sickly" misspelled

I hope this helps. And that you aren't offended. You did ask. :-)

Judy

[/ QUOTE ]

No Judy I am not offended. This is exactly what i was asking for. Id much rather have some one on the forums point this out to me. Itd be somewhat embarassing if a client pointed those thing out to me.
 
That's a comprehensive review of your site! Just to add to what Judy said, instead of just making statements of facts or information turn them into value statements. That is, the sentence should relate the fact to a value to the reader. What is in it for them? Will it improve the worth of their property, reduce costs, improve their environment?
 
Some action shots or links better define your services would be nice. I like seeing pictures that show compliance with the z133 when I browse other sites.
 
Hi Mike,

The editorial work Judy did is great, and there is more you need to consider. For example, I did a search on various ways to find "tree services", "tree removal", "arborist" etc in the Fresno area and your site did not come up at all. You can have the most gorgeous website in the world but you need to be found! I believe you are using Wix as a free or nearly free website product but you might want to invest a little more in a different platform that can help with boosting your visibility. The balance is in having good text on the site to keep the internet indexing robots happy and good visuals to make people happy.

Your text tells a lot of positive aspects of trees in one sense (beauty, ecology, etc.), but you might want to appeal to the need for having top of the line tree care for adding value to a homeowner's property, increase the attractiveness to an office building, natural water filtering in areas that are prone to run-off, etc...) Something has to make someone say, "Yes, I need to spend some money so that my property will look better for selling it at top dollar..." In marketing terms, you need to tie the features (which you discuss nicely about what trees do) to the benefits of having them well cared for (healthy trees convert airborne pollution into cleaner air and help make people less prone to breathing problems like asthma, a tree that is well pruned will grow into an attractive way that increases your home's value, etc.)

Use of social media like Facebook, Google Business pages, and other tools is also key to getting "the love" from the internet search engines. They are biased in favor of websites that look like they are being visited from other places, and adding new content via a blog is highly important. You can use posts to a blog and to Facebook to highlight good tips for folks to help them understand the biology of their trees.

I will repeat the need to have your phone number and address figure pretty prominently on the main page.

As an ISA Certified Arborist, I would assume you have a membership and ability to display the ISA logo prominently. Do you belong to any local Chambers of Commerce that will allow you to display their logo? This is some of the visual items you can add that get human attention.

What makes me think a tree service (as well as a landscape service) has done a great job demonstrating their work is to do before and after shots of their work. I would pick out some of your larger projects and highlight them.

Hope this is helpful in addition to the other input.
 
Judy

Great feed back on this web site. I am also updating to a new site and would really appreciate your input as well.

url=http://www.mtsne.com]Mountain Tree Service[/url]
 
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