Hi Clive,

Before I continue I just want to highlight the fact my background is technical which covers development, information architecture, usability, accessibility and marketing. I am not a designer so the colour scheme won't be getting any attention as I'm the last person to know what looks good.

I've had a scout through and here's my opinion.

Markup
Taking the home page, the HTML is valid HTML 4.01 Transitional but there is a header mismatch. The current document appears to be UTF-8 encoded but the META tag specifies Latin-1. Rectification involves a change of the META tag to UTF-8 so it's an easy solution.

I run the home page through the validator, this time against HTML 4.01 Strict and the results were surprisingly good (Check here). There were errors but the errors were easy things to fix, for example, changing align="right" to style="float:right;" or incorporating the positioning into the stylesheet. This would result in the widely recommended HTML 4.01 Strict Doctype for your site.

Semantics and structure look good so nothing to note there. As for usability, I would say this is a strength. The introduction to each section is clear, the message of the service gets to the point and the call to action is present and flows well from the content.

Objectives
Again, it's clear what you do, who and where you serve which is the most important thing with any website. What really matters I guess is where your market are most likely to indentify your services. A lot of web design companies in Hastings do the best business through local networking and client referrals. Very little actually comes through the search engines or other online sources. I'm wondering how much affiliate or referring business you get for the ecommerce templates? Not knowing much about the business support services in and around Horsham, do you know of your local Business Link advisor or Enterprise Hub? These are business support services that often, even daily get asked about how to trade online. One of the remits is to also recommend local services so they act as a great channel to market. Becoming known to them as a client and/or a supplier will almost certainly benefit your products and services as we see it directly here in Hastings. Trouble is it's the website here we're auditing so we're going off track but it's in my nature to be holistic about these things and the bottom line is always profit.

One thing of note though is the ecommerce page. I had a couple of my mates have a look at it. They run businesses but don't necessarily understand the web that well but when they saw 'Linux hosting required call...' and 'dwt files included' they kind of went vacant. I guess to balance the message it needs to appeal to the people that know what they want for their business but don't know what they want from technology. It's a hard call but in the world of bitesize information the odd header declaring, "ready-to-go online shop for your business" could give people the confidence to make the call and find out more.

clivewalker wrote:

I will need to assess the strict doctype because I use an iframe on a couple of pages and because I use the target attribute on some others. Mostly this is because of template affiliate code [ecommerce and other templates].

I noticed that in the source. I guess the important thing is a valid transitional doctype over a non-valid strict. I'm sure others will argue that but I'm firmly in the camp of not sacrificing functionality for doctype and that validation is more important than which type it is.

clivewalker wrote:

Good point re Enterprise hub/Business Link. I have been in touch with an "Enterprise Centre" in the past but I must admit I am slightly confused how this works in Sussex. There seem to be several "Enterprise Centres" and "Sussex Enterprise" and some of these organisations appear to have changed their name recently. Business Link, I know nothing about - is this an independent organisation?

I get confused myself and I work alongside them. The first port of call is your local Enterprise Hub which can be found at www.seedaenterprisehubs.co.uk. They act, strangely enough, as a hub for all business support. If they can't help directly, then being know to them about the skillset you possess and the services you offer will be beneficial as Hub directors meet many hundreds of companies and usually get asked the same sort of questions, nearly always regarding use of the web in the form of marketing.

I would start with a general enquiry email introducing yourself and the business you represent and ask what they can offer in terms of support. One of the jobs is also signposting so you may get pushed around to different people but that's a good thing as more people know what you do then ;-)