After weeks of work we are happy to have the new Gurock Software website up and running. It’s always fascinating to see how much work such a small project really takes. Designing all the pages, adjusting the old PHP code, writing the copy, making screenshots and images, rewriting the copy because you already hate the new copy after a day, testing it with some often used browsers, updating the shop and lots of other stuff I forgot.
Why did we develop a new website in the first place? Well, we didn’t like the old design and copy anymore. Instead of changing the copy and design in small incremental steps, we thought it would be a better idea to start from scratch and build a completely new website. We are happy that we made the decision because we really like the outcome. We hope that the new website looks and reads much more professional than the old one.
We would love to get some feedback from you on our new website. So if you have a minute to spare, please visit our new website and leave a comment here. Any feedback would be welcome, especially suggestions to make it better or pointing out any errors that we didn’t catch.
5 Comments
Excellent work Dennis and Tobias.
The site looks very professional. Navigation is EXCELLENT.
I was able to go to your Downloads section from any page within your site, which is very good.
Your breadcrumb navigation is subtle and is very helpful.
All your URLs are meaningful which should help you in your Google Ranking.
Few other remarks:
On Product overview page (http://www.gurock.com/products/smartinspect/)
- Why not display a price? I like how FogCreek displays their price as $129 per user or less. The word less is linked to a page where you can see that buying multiple licenses can reduce your per-user price.
- I didn’t expect pricing information to be available under menu item, ‘Licensing’. Could we not name it as ‘pricing’?
- Why don’t you link to Mike’s review of SmartInspect? http://www.larkware.com/Reviews/smartinspect.html. I think this will land more credibility. [Yes, you have linked to the review in the separate review page, but I don’t think it will harm to link to the review even on the overview page.]
- Very minor quibble, the top menu is not aligned with your logo. See
http://img401.imageshack.us/img401/9376/grid3md.jpg
- Code is nice and clean, though I feel that it suffers from DIV mania. For example in following code:
Delphi Logging
If you are a Delphi for Win32 or C++Builder developer, you can use SmartInspect’s native
Delphi library to add high-performance logging to your Windows desktop or service application.
Special database log methods and support for Delphi’s RTTI make SmartInspect well suited for
all kinds of Delphi projects.
Why do you have that extra inner DIV [the one without associated class]?
- The highlight color for H2, F0F0F0, is hardly noticeable on my LCD. [May be my brightness is too high?] You might want to make it bit dark or give a grey underline like border-bottom: 1px solid #ccc; Just a suggestion.
- I am not sure if I like ‘Email this page’ link especially when it pops up my email client. I think your target audience is savvy enough to email any development tool page, that they like, themselves.
- The forums and knowledge base in your support section is EXCELLENT. Is it some custom code you wrote?
As you can see, I have nothing to add, absolutely nothing.
I can safely say that yours is one of the BEST product site I have come across.
Good luck,
JD
I agree with JD, the new site is excellent. Very clean with nice readable fonts everywhere. Navigation indeed works fine, I could find everything easily plus I always knew where I am. Great work!
Very good! Congratulations!
Excellent! Great job, guys!
Thanks for the compliments! It’s great to see that all the work was worth it.
JD: The double DIV thingy is a workaround for older IE versions. Older IE browsers calculate the width of a div wrong if the padding and width is specified in the stylesheet. Adding the price and renaming the Licensing page is a good idea and we will probably change it. Btw, the forum is custom code because we couldn’t find a simple forum and HelpSpot wasn’t available when we wrote the first site. I will check the colors on some CRT, and have a look at the logo and email link issues. Thanks for the great suggestions!