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Great information here, thanks so much for your feedback and advice!

Excellent advice; I fully admit that I am not a designer and will try and incorporate your ideas and suggestions slowly but surely. Most of the text on the landing page exists for SEO content (the huge block especially). I don't expect most visitors to pay attention to it, but is it possible that it is a turn-off, even if they don't bother to read it?

For the record I ignored Monkuar's first post as a troll attempt, but did take action on some of his suggestions in the second post- so I appreciate KevinM1 for calling him out

Damn, I tried to sneak edit that out before anyone noticed...

No offense taken, my response is that my family and employees are glad that your thought process isn't quite right But you do raise an interesting point, and since no one seems to find anything really wrong with the site from a design point of view (so far), maybe my quality of traffic simply is poorer than I had assumed, causing a higher bounce rate than I'm content with.

Thank you very much for this; it tests properly on every system I have access to, will have to try and tweak some code.

My conversion rate is very high in comparison to a 2.2% rate for traditional shopping sites; I just can't get past the fact that it could be better if I didn't have so many visitors thinking "agh, no thanks!" within the first 5 seconds.

I've had this business since 2003 and redesign the site every three years or so. I've always been dissatisfied with my average bounce rate for the home page (58% over the last three months) and am convinced that I'm losing out on potential sales due to lost interest. I know that bounce rate does not depend on page design alone, but can anyone see any immediate turn-offs on my site that make you want to leave right away? http://www.pacificvideorepair.com Thanks for your time!

Removed. Thank you for the advice! Visitors who view one page or the other are 30% more likely to convert, according to Analytics. There are three interpretations of this information that I can think of: 1. The pages convey extra confidence on their own. 2. A visitor that is more likely to convert will view more of the site in the first place. 3. A combination of 1 and 2. IMO, if people convert more often if they view those two pages, why not make them easier to find? A box for everything and everything in it's box. The boxed content has been re-applied to make certain information pop, rather than simply contain all information, thank you!

Many of the images were uncompressed .jpegs created during the design process; there's still efficiency to be found but I have compressed the worst offenders (the banner was 300k!!). I discussed your comment with a number of IRL's and while no one agreed fully, I took their input and yours and changed the highlight color in the nav from gold to dark blue and the heading text in the content boxes from yellow to white.

This is interesting because I do make the content easy to find, imo. I paid for and used the search bar with the prior website as a way to take up some white space and to try make the site seem more upscale- the search itself was an added bonus if a visitor wanted to use it. Over the last four months only 0.35% of visitors actually use the search bar, and while the new version has been up for only a few days no one has used it. So, do people (designers and customers) think that a search bar adds anything beyond functionality? People sure aren't using it, so if it doesn't make the site "feel" more professional I should probably take it out, right?

I have added rounded boxes around all above the fold content, I believe it solves the white space issue, and makes the content more usable and organized.

Thanks everyone, great stuff here!

Hello all and thank you in advance! I am not a programmer, though I've built my site in all its iterations with notepad and patience. I am not a designer, so I've tried to copy elements from other sites that "feel" good to me. The results are a site that admittedly is not up to par in terms of code validations and I am concerned that the feel of the site is not as professional as it needs to be. For years I have focused on SEO, and now think that I have missed the bar in terms of the site as a sales tool. The redesign project was undertaken after years of being dissatisfied with a 60-70% bounce rate for the /index and a comment from a friend who upon seeing the prior version said that it seemed "scammy". (http://web.archive.org/web/20110423174522/http://pacificvideorepair.com/) (It looked a bit better than the WBM would have you believe...) The goal of my site is to impart confidence and convey professionalism while informing the visitor. While the site does the job in terms of receiving orders, I'm not sure I've achieved those goals as well as they could be achieved. Portions of the site still need work in terms of transferring to the new direction, so while usable I consider it a work in progress. Thank you very much for your time! http://www.pacificvideorepair.com/