Geez, now I just sound like a parrot... I, too, would say that the most annoying item is the flash content. In particular, the specular highlight that animates around the person makes this site look somewhat like the chintzy sites created by one of those Russian "Let Us Built Your Website for Only $49" things. (No offense to any Russian designers reading this...)
Professional Comments and Opinions
As a website designer, logo/branding/identity package designer creator, and more importantly, as teacher of color theory as it applies to digital work such as websites, logos, and photographs, my comments (and opinions) are as follows:
Branding and Identity (and Corporate Colors)
The corporate colors might be better defined too. It is obvious that the corporate color scheme revolves around a blue, but all other color references on the site (particularly the home page) are vague and confusing. What I mean by this is that no corporate color set or distinct corporate identity package has been arrived at, apparently. Such a color set generally consists of 3-5 colors in some arrangement around an "artistic" color wheel (as opposed to a "scientific" color wheel) and the colors are then the three main colors are generally used in 60%, 30%, 10% proportions (60% of the "main" color, 30% of the "second corporate color", 10% of the "third corporate color" - this is an old designers rule useful for most arrangements of color around the color wheel, such as split complementaries, triad, square, rectangle, etc. - your designer should know about these).
The chosen "corporate colors", whatever they are, can also (and should be) used in variations of brightness (generally) or saturation (sometimes employed). As things stand right now (with no direct offense to the previous designer intended - just suppling hopefully useful information for a new website) the color choices, say, on the home page, are at best a bit confusing as they currently stand.
With no absolute corporate colors or branding standing out, and thus no specific logo standing out - then what text, graphic or combination of the two actually represents the identity of TCH? When the site changed to the current version, it was unclear if the fading spheres were intended to be the logo, and if so, then what is this logo's proper use in other contexts - such as in the middle of the pages or in reduced color or even black and white? And why doesn't that current logo design scream out - "I'm the wordless definition of TotalChoice Hosting!" which is what should be happening, when in fact it seems to be rather weakly coupled with the brand name of TotalChoice Hosting.
With regards to company branding, ask the question: is my mark "trademarkable"?
SEO Comments : The Home Page
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Comments (I wish to see TCH grow and continue to be a leader in the services you provide - so these are my opinions on appropriate SEO content. SEO is probably more art than science, but some items listed below are firmly defeating "best practices" instead of following them... Warning - none of this is hard and fast rules, as no such rules exist given the diversity of search engines; this is instead a set of guidelines.): The main page (home page) likely needs more text from an SEO perspective. The recommended amount of text on the home page is about 2-3 "screens full" of text - which loosely translated comes out to around 800 - 1600 words. There are currently around 320 words on the home page. Furthermore, there are only 4 references to the business name (TotalChoice Hosting) and somewhere around 6-10 is ideal within the context of robot "readable" content on the page.
There should also be several (read 3-5 or more) references to the company slogan ("Choice Does Matter!") - there are zero (in search engine robot readable form in the text content areas - yes, it is available in a graphic, but no where else, not even as an alt tag on an image, which it should be several times).
The alt="" option of the <img /> tags are improperly loaded with keywords about the nature of business. Even small pieces of graphics can (should) be used to push the business name, mission statement, slogan, etc. since these alt tags are then read by the spidering robots for many major search engines. For example: the src="orangesqure.gif"[sic] appears 10 times - this is a waste of 10 tags that could contain information about the company, its services, and mission.
The mission statement does show up on the home page, which is a Good Thing.
Any links produced by the flash elements (i.e. embedded in flash, say) should also probably be reconstructed in a minor text menu (generally at the bottom of the page to keep it obscure, but available) - this does three things - A) it allows spidering robots to follow links that otherwise would have been skipped, it is useful for those 1-2% who use variants of text browsers and C) (related to B, often) it is in keeping with good Accessibility guidelines for those who have talking computers (such as for blind or sight limited persons).
The text in the plan boxes ("STARTERPLAN", "DELUXEPLAN", "EXPERTPLAN") is unsearchable since it is graphical and not text. This should either change to text overlapping a graphic or else have an appropriate alt tag with all the information since this is one of your big selling points (the current alt tags only give prices - the storage, bandwidth and perks are also very important but ignored and unreadable by a spidering robot).
Finally, the meta tags (description and keywords, in particular) could be used much more effectively for SEO purposes - more keywords and descriptors, what makes TCH stand out and a few common misspellings, all while trying to avoid keyword and description loading (more than about 15-20 keywords might cause problems). All of those things said, there are also several things that are designed well for SEO such as the number of links into and out of the home page and the names of the pages they reference, which are generally descriptive.
Disclaimer
These opinions are my own. I know there are other designers out there reading this forum - if so, let's not quarrel about any one person's specifics (such as the above) but focus on presenting ideas that will help TCH. I do not claim that any, some or all of the concepts and ideas above are absolutes, but they represent my best judgement on the issues I deal with daily in my job as a graphic designer, and website designer.
Cheers,
Patrick
