I'm considering switching to joomla because I hear they have great professional looking templates. I like the site I created with Visual Site Designer but I have concerns that it may look dated and like a site for a small company. Could you please help me critique? I use Visual Site Designer 7 and SlideShow Creator. Very easy to use, but I'm not sure they give me the options I'm seeking for a professionally designed site. Of course I'm not a professional web designer, so I need all the help I can get from templates that were created by creative minds!!

www.onestopplumbers.com

Hi Conrad, Looks pretty good to me. How about tweaking your navigation menu to change on mouseover. The image of your truck on the about page needs to be compressed as 548 k loads really slow. Really should keep images below 100k if you can. You can always link a small image to a larger one if it's needed. You also have a bad url on you helpfultips page at tip #2 "Preventive Maintenance".

I came from joomla to CC

joomla, is at best complicated, easy for those who cope well with html etc, but its not as wysiwyg at it looks

and CC have some very nice templates as well, a techy friend of mine keeps telling me website design is subjective, and i think he is right, a website should look big boy, if your a multiple, and a one man band if you want customers who WISH not to be dealt with by an employee, but the skilled craftsman himself.

This might sound like a daft idea, BUT imagine from a customers point of view, instead of the picture of a pretty young lady answering the phone, in an office, the same pretty young lady in a pair of overalls with a blow torch in one hand and her mobile in the other, would attract a different clientèle, to a picture of you in your overalls with a blow lamp in one hand and a mobile in the other. but both images say speak directly to an expert !!

My own website has a picture of me at my bench, cutting out a name pendant, lots of customers over the years have commented on the fact it makes them feel they know who they are talking to when they phone up for advice.

I think what we lack at CC is a place to advertise, or give away templates we have all made that we are willing for others to use.

I just did a search for chino hills plumber, I guess your not Dailymotion his video says it all, and maybe in USA dailymotion means something different to in UK had me in stitches

your keywords need changing if you want better ranking than their website, don't repeat key words.

Thank you for taking the time to provide your comments. I found several of them very helpful. I now better understand how to accomplish keywords and how to properly apply h1 title tags in VSD. Great help. I'm still not fully convinced that my design isn't dated, but I think I will seek additional input from others before investing my time to re-design.

thank you!
www.onestopplumbers.com

Conrad,

I just looked at your site. Did not break everything down piecemeal but think
it looks excellent.

To me it looks better than many business sites.
Regarding small business, you think that, but your storefront seh's
clean, professional and let me help you.
Keep in mind your site versus company with 50,000 employees, folks just
don't know.
Your site is at minimum comparable to some large companies and better than some of them.
Check out http://www.homedepot.com and http://www.lowes.com I like lowes better.
Yours is as good or even better than Lowes.

Frank