Website Review and Feedback Please

Wow, that's a really great website, especially that it's your first!! I liked the video. It was clear & straight to the point, which is what customers want to hear.
I took the little survey on the contact page, but didn't see a "submit" button. How do you get the information?
The colors are great, perfect for the subject.

You may want to review your green font color selection on a green background. Using stunning background colors makes a visually stunning impression but it's distracting and makes sites more difficult to read. I would avoid using too many colors. I would try building the site on a neutral color. Your pics and accents will pop and make the page beautiful. Think of it like room decor and design. If you'd hired a home decorator and she came up with this combination for the living room in your house, would you find it acceptable? Experiment a little. You can always change it back. All of us have been enamored with colored backgrounds and colored fonts. In most cases, I find less is more. Susan has a great essay on the fundamentals of building a website. Maybe she'll chime in and produce it for our forum again. It's an excellent guide to website building and she covers most basic design topics beautifully.

Loreta - I took a quick look at your home page. Here are just a few things that I think you might consider:   

Battista Farms is a family owned and operated business in Fort Myers, (add state) Florida. We have proudly served Lee and Collier County area for the past 39 years. Battista Farms produces quality sand grown Floratam and Bahia sod from our 220 acre farm. 

We service homeowners, landscape contractors, home builders and land developers. All sod can be professionally installed by our trained and experienced crews.

Battista Farms also operates a retail nursery with a wide variety of flowers, plants, trees and garden materials. In today’s market many of our customers return for the great quality (remove comma) and value of our products. If we do not have what you’re looking for, we will be more than happy to order it for you.

I would also move the navigational bar to line up directly with your logo.

I would remove the copyright thing too rather than advertise for Homestead, but you're stuck removing it on every single page.  That's a headache.

You might want to try a good yellow color for your mouseover on your navigational bar, similar to the color on your Sod Calculator link.  The red color is getting caught in the grass, and I'm thinking that the yellow or another color might work a little better.  

Hi Loreta,

It's easy to see you've spent time and energy on creating the site. The site is easy to navigate and uncluttered which makes for a nicer journey for your visitors.

You've gotten some good feedback here. I totally agree about the color being too much. I would keep the lime green color behind the logo and then go with either white or a real pale yellow like #fdfde9 for the rest.

Using the grass chunks for the navigation is clever, but I wonder if it isn't perhaps masking the links a bit too much. You want those links to stand out so your visitor sees them immediately.

I didn't see any alt text on the images. It's important, as the Search Engines and folks who use assistive technology can't see the pictures. By providing alt text you give both an idea of what the image represents.

Page weight is creeping up there I suspect due to the videos as I couldn't see any images that were bloated. Just keep that in mind before you add too much more to the existing pages.

Titles and descriptions could both use a boost. Rather than starting them with your company name put your primary keywords or phrases at the beginning. If you set up a Google Webmaster Account it will give you some ideas on your meta tags as well as lots of other info.

Look up a couple of posts - I gave a link to a Design Guide you can download that might help you.

Best of luck.

Hi Loreta,

I am in agreement with all the suggestions made here. You have a good level of content on your pages. Just make sure that any word or words you want to be found for in a search are on one of your pages, in the natural content. This is very important.

I think the most important thing is to work on the menu. I agree that the grass is a clever touch, but it does make the menu a bit difficult to read. You can try a couple of things. If you bold the font, the white should brighten up a bit. If that doesn't solve it, consider looking at a solid shade of green for the menu background, maybe hunter green.

I BIG Thank you to everyone for your feedback! I feel I have been able to improve our site with all of your input. The new and improved site is now live. www.battistafarms.com Check it out and see what you've helped me do! Thanks again!!! 

Wow! You do listen. It's spot on now! Great job. How much do you love it now?

That is much better Loreta - my eyes thank you!  :)
You might want to go back and add your own copyright on the pages - some have none and some have the 'canned' Homestead one that is an ad for them. You can create the copyright using a text box and just enter your info.