Home Page for Makeover Machine website

Overall this site looks great. It's fun, is engaging, has personality and the illustration works really well.

• It would be nice if there was an 'about' section. I want to know more about why a company would want to spend so many hours a week doing redesigns for people for fun/free. Also is the coding included or are photoshop psd documents supplied or just jpegs? An FAQ would be helpful too.

• As far as the design goes the logo is too similar in size to me to the sell in the top right corner. My eye isn't naturally drawn through the site and these two top elements need their hierarchy sorted out. One should be more prominent than the other.

• Next the spacing on the element on the left feels a little off. The 'Why should I try it' line is as close to the logo above as the copy below but then there is a horizontal rule between 'plus... it's FREE Try it now.' I would move the sub head 'Why should I try it?' a little lower down and put the copy it's relating to slightly closer to it. Then either separate out the plus... it's FREE line either further away or so that it lives with the copy above better.

• The colours are great and the before & after makeovers are great although very large but at least this way you get to see them properly. Maybe though look at making them smaller and possible to click through if people want to see them bigger. That way you could have a footer which isn't quite so far down the bottom of the page and use that for FAQs, abouts and some links to maybe your professional paid for work.

Honestly I'm having a hard time picking just the right stuff to nitpick on because I really like the layout and the idea. Everything is well placed, the graphic is neat (which made me chuckle... because our own website uses a similar illustration, but a little less colorful: link text

My main "beef" is with two areas of the site. The first is the left column. Wile you have substantial white space on the right side of the page, the left column seems a bit cramped. The button (submit my site) is harder to read and due to it's size is hard to "pin" as a button. We expect buttons to be of certain size - you should cater to those expectations. The bullet points and spacing around that list also could use some work.

The second part is the bottom before and afters. I would suggest removing the names of the companies and making the screens of even size. I would also suggest making the "banners" across the top right corner to be of the same color for all before's and all after's.

Add lightbox functionality to allow the user to expand the screen capture. A really light, slight drop shadow border around each capture would give it depth and dimension.

Other than that I don't have anything - you're on the right path.

Firstly, this is an excellent design concept. The illustration s brilliant and very original!

My biggest gripe is that it looks more like a poster/flyer than a website. Reason being the lack of an apparent form of site navigation (i understand the main call-to-action is to submit and/or signup) and a strong footer to complement.

What I'd really love to do is not layout so many screenshots at a go. Perhaps some form of carousel would keep it a little cleaner, focused and more "interactive" (allowing the user to cycle through the various screens).

To take the concept one step further and keeping with the fun and simple branding that you've set out to achieve, you could introduce something playful as indicators for the "Before" and "After" instead of the diagonal ribbon on the top right. Perhaps a little "Duh!" vs "Wow!" kind of smilie.

More details in the notes.

There's lots of design, but not a lot of development.

Love the graphic and I can see that the designer must be really good at illustrator and photoshop and can simply mock up a site in those programs. I just hope that you are not slicing up .psd or .ai files. This wont be good for clients that want a lot of changes, but great for someone that just wants a static site.

Ok, I got my two cents out of the way. About this site specifically...

1. Definitely needs a better footer. It looks like you put a lot of work into the Makeover Machine, but got lazy when it came to the footer
2. No menu navigation. The concept is nice, but no way to find out what the catch is. No section to describe the "CEO" and their education, history, etc. If I were a client, and not a winner of your contest, I would wonder what costs are to maintain the site, etc.
3. Jquery! This site could be really awesome with some nice jquery sliders, but I can see that the designer's talent is not in programming, but in graphic design. You should check out some jquery articles on smashingmagazine.com or Web Designer Magazine's recent JQuery issue.
4. When I looked up the sites you display, they are not redesigned like you show. That leads me to wonder who has actually taken you up on your makeover machine content (which btw, has no deadline?)
5. Basically, I like the direction you are heading in, I like how you are inspiring a "wow, i wanna submit my site" mentality, but I have serious issues with describing your business model on your site.

Hello - I'll start by saying that I love the design concept. The 50's theme definitely works, and the main image is right on point. Overall aesthetically pleasing, however what bothers me is the following:

• where's the main navigation? (about us, contact, gallery, client testimonials, etc...)
• Where is the privacy policy?
• Terms and Conditions?
• what is the selection criteria?
• if selected, what does that specifically entail?
• sign up link for makeover event is expired. (either remove it completely upon expiration or display next available event details)
• when i went to the Super Web-O-Matic site, a few of the client gallery examples had bogus footer information which puts up red flags for me.
• if I submit a site and am not "selected" for a revamp, am I notified?

You're requiring users to submit their name, company name, email, phone number, site url, and reason for submission, yet disclose nothing as to what they will get in return.

I'll add my 2 cents - agree with the other reviews, loving the design and illustration and focusing on adding the navigation and making this more a site than a flyer, but i think there are some more things to add, to increase conversion:

1. Instead of "plus... it's Free..." and a separate Submit My Site, create a button saying - SUBMIT MY SITE as top sentence, and It's Free! as the sentence below

2. If there's a sign up/ creating an account, it should be on the first page. If i have submitted my site, i'm not sure i want to see this page everytime and scroll down to see if it's featured, so you could use cookies to re-direct users to another page (or have this top section as an expand/ collapse panel)

3. i think that since the elements are round (the logo, points), the buttons should have round corners as well