I just did a review of JBM Automation website.  If I did a review of your company would you be pissed?

Here's the link   

Let me know your thoughts...Is it too long?  Do I say ummm too much.

I wanted to keep it shorter, but just couldn't.


I don't expect you to watch the entire 20 min.  

Well.... you tore down their website in a public YouTube video. Yeah, I think they might be a little pissed. LOL!!!

Maybe it would have been better to send them an email or private message about your thoughts on their website. Just saying.

Since I am into photography, I follow Jared Polin on YT. Every now and then he has critique videos on websites that people have submitted to him. These are people who voluntarily sent him their website knowing Jared will go over it.

These critiques are sponsored by SquareSpace, but that does not limit him to only critiquing websites built on SS. As you can see in this video.

He normally keeps his videos around the 10 minute mark. But for whatever reason this video went a little over board.

Respectively, you kept on saying “you” a lot. As if he, Paul, is to blame. I’m not saying he is or isn’t. I’m sure someone else designed the website with his approval though. But critiqutizing a website in that manaor isn’t, well, polite.

I totally understand you’re starting out and used someone’s website out of the blue. Perhaps making this video private would be a good idea for now. Ask for volunteers from here. And when you see something that doesn’t work, make a suggestion. Heck, since you’re a website designer. You could have some templates ready to show how you think the website that you’re reviewing should look like. I’m not saying to design the entire website, but rather just a section. Example would be the 7 section slider on a 6 second delay. Create a simple template on how you think that should be done... of course that could’ve been done but I stopped the video at the 5 minute mark to write this.

KOT

Everybody here should take a few minutes, which could easily turn into an hour or more, at www.websitesthatsuck.com. If, that is, it's still around. It's a great educational site built by a couple of wacko webmasters who want people to improve what they see and what they want in good websites... by looking at bad websites.

About 20 years ago after building my first website with notepad.exe (all html and css coded by hand with tutorials from w3schools) i found terrible website. No idea how i got there and i cant even remember what the site was for. Some small business. As a project i rebuilt their entire site using current standards with better organized pages and content. I even redid their logo. When i was done i emailed them the files with short note. Never got a response but a week later they replaced their old site with the one i made for them. They kept their old logo though lol.

I think posting examples of your work is better than spending 15 minutes tearing down others.

I certainly value constructive criticism. When we are so close to our work, we tend to lose the ability to see things from an outside point of view. I'm always interested in critiques of our marketing and our design/install efforts. This is why we schedule a "lessons learned" meeting with the client after each project.

However, I would MUCH prefer that such a critique be emailed to me privately. This wouldn't offend me in the least and would actually be appreciated, but I suspect it may offend some.

I would suggest removing this youtube video. While you made valid points, and it was well done, it's not going to sit well with everyone.

This is the exact reaction I was looking for..... I don't want it to sit well with them.  If they're embarrassed that I ripped their website, they should be embarrassed when the average person runs across it.

If they think it's a good representation of the work their company does, that's great. If not, they need to fix it, because many more people have stumbled across it before I did.

Will the average person know how to write or say why they like/dislike a website in a usable way?

I did like the photo (lower left in their 'Some of our recent projects' gallery) captioned 'Living Room with Inceiling Audio' that shows two speakers in the wall.

I've always found building yourself up rather than tearing others down is a much more effective marketing and presentation strategy.

I would be incredibly offended by your "review", if that was my site. It would certainly not make me want to hire you to fix it.

You are also looking at this from a unique perspective. You were inthe industry for a long time so you understand the AV process AND you are a website developer. this combination of strong opinions came off incredibly arrogant in the video. I think a lot of what you nitpick, the average person browsing the site wouldnt notice or care about at all.

If you presented what you do better, rather than what they did worse, the message would be a lot clearer. I watched about 15 minutes.... in all of that time, I didnt learn what you could do to make it better. maybe you did say... but I was so distracted by you talking about what was wrong, any message as to how you could fix it was totally lost.

I probably didn't make it clear at the beginning.  I'm not doing the reviews as an offer or request to work.  I couldn't handle the workload.   I don't think I made mention of..I can do this, or I can do that, or call me so I can fix this for you.  That's not what I'm attempting to do.

I'm doing the reviews because I think guys need to know how people are viewing their website, why they might be losing work, and possibly what their competitors might be doing.

The designer has a link on the bottom of his website. I never pointed it out, made mention of his designer being bad, etc.

I'm just trying to point out how the average person is viewing your site.   And believe me, that site is pretty good compared to some I've seen.

I just did one for a company in NY, that's actually really good.

I think you got the answer you asked for.
maybe you could create a dummy website with some of the common errors people make and use that as your critique tool. Using someone else's site without their blessing is asking for heartburn.

I think the suggestions are valuable and worthwhile - heck i'm about to delete some old content based on the video!

So how pissed did they get?

So your just doing this because you like to tear up bad websites? I cant imagine anyone would appreciate that. Its kinda like folks that think they are helping people by correcting spelling and grammar. They somehow feel they are doing some sort of community service by pointing out how dumb they think people are.... it never goes over well.

Exactly! If someone posted a 15 minute video about why my website was shitty I don't see how I would want to hire that person to fix it. Its just unprofessional and reflects badly on the person who made the video in the first place.