The Web Critics mini reviews of Yorkshire Mafia member websites

One of the great things about The Yorkshire Mafia is some of the interesting people you meet.  When Mark Evans met Charles Clayton at one of the drinks evenings a great conversation ensued and Mark learnt plenty of useful tips from Charles about web usage.  Charles very kindly reviewed some of the websites of people he met that night and we were lucky enough to be one of those.

SMileS SMS – http://www.smilessms.com/

The company that sent us all a nice reminder about the drinks do. I now understand more about SMS marketing and how not to annoy people with it. Their website: small blue writing is difficult to read, no staff pictures, no SEO, but Mark  knows his stuff about SMS marketing….I hadn’t seen it the way he described it to me.

Charles identified some areas for improvement for our SMileS site which we took on board as positive criticism and as a result made a few changes. For example, Charles mentioned we have no staff pictures on our website, from this we have set up our ‘Meet the Team’ page so people can get to know a bit more about the people that work for SMileS and what role they play within the team. Adding the ‘Meet the team’ section was a great idea for SMileS as we often place emphasis on our team environment when doing business as we feel its one of our main strengths. This is due to the friendly and personal relationship we have with many of our customers which helps build a good rapport and create a good business working environment. By showing this on our website it helps potential customers get a feel for SMileS and the type of relationship they will have when working with us; which is often a contributing factor in the decision making process of which SMS software provider they want to use and can often reflect their own company ethos.

One of the points he raised was about our blue text, which is one we agonise over, i.e. using the corporate colour versus readability.  We would love your feedback, does the blue text work for you or should we change it?  Help us decide.