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Meet Monitoring Solutions

Website: monsol.com

Monitoring Solutions, founded in 1997, specializes in helping industry and government clients to monitor and report on air pollution and keep up with regulatory requirements.

The company played a part in creating some of the first-ever dilution and extraction systems and prides itself on offering some of the most reliable, accurate, and easy-to-maintain continuous emissions monitoring systems (CEMS) on the market.

In this week’s B2B web design review, we closely look at Monitoring Solutions’ homepage.

First Impressions

The “three-second rule” states that, upon landing on a website’s homepage, the visitor should be able to understand what the company does in three seconds or less.

The first headline, “Now offering complete Source Emissions Testing and Stack Testing,” is not as clear as it could be to a person unfamiliar with the company. However, there are many contextual clues on Monitoring Solutions’ homepage. A subheading or similar descriptive statement beneath the main header could enhance the homepage.

The header image and images paired with the clickable directionals are relevant and help to provide visual context alongside the text.

Audience

A website visitor should also be able to quickly understand who the business’s target audience is. However, this is not entirely apparent on Monitoring Solutions’ website and has to be inferred indirectly via other cues.

Relevant imagery, for example, an image of an engineer reviewing a technical drawing, could make this clearer. Your audience should be able to see themselves reflected on your website, and viewers tend to gravitate more towards images of people.

Below the Fold

As we scroll further down Monitoring Solutions’ homepage, we see a text-heavy news item, a featured product, quick links, testimonials, and blog posts. At the bottom of the page is a newsletter sign-up form and logos for key business partners.

The text-heavy section breaks up the page and disrupts the user flow. Though this is a necessary item, there may have been a better place to situate it. A larger, clearer headline would also indicate what this section is about, allowing users to skip it if it is irrelevant to their needs.

Quick links have gone out of style in the website design world recently. However, they can still be useful in some contexts. On this site, they help users to find the content they need quickly and easily. However, we suggest breaking each quick link out into its own directional. This allows for more text to be included, which is good news for SEO and improves the user’s viewing experience.

We would also advise changing the image in the Featured Product section, as the current one is unclear and does not fit the space well. This is another area where an image featuring a person would be more suitable.

Design and Navigation

The font choice is appropriate for a technical website and works well with this site’s design. The headline uses a mix of sentence case and title case, which is a small detail that can nevertheless be distracting and detract from the site’s overall feel of professionalism. It is best to choose one case and stick to it.

The blue and orange color palette is very standard. Blue is an excellent choice for this type of website, as it denotes a sense of calm and stability. However, it is also the most common color choice for B2B design, making it easy to get lost amidst the competition. Monitoring Solutions could make more use of the contrasting orange to make its design stand out from similar companies.

Monitoring Solutions’ website utilizes a standard navigation bar at the top of the homepage with touchscreen-friendly clickable links. “Source Testing” could become “Testing,” and “Service and Support” could become “Support” to simplify the navigation options. The search bar is also not particularly useful for this type of website.

The site is well-structured, with H1, H2, and H3 headings used appropriately to improve SEO and navigability. Alt tags should be added to the site’s images for accessibility and SEO purposes.

Conclusion

Ian’s Overall Grade: B- or C

Jeff’s Overall Grade: C

Overall, Monitoring Solutions’ website is well designed and outperforms its competitors in design and SEO. It passes the three-second rule, we understand what the company is selling, and the site is easy to navigate.

This site is around six years old, making it due for a refresh. A good website could become a great one with a few simple changes such as improving the imagery, making more creative use of the color scheme, adding alt text, and making the company’s audience clear.

You can see this full website design review and all our reviews on our YouTube channel.

Our B2B web design team has decades of experience helping our clients reach customers, grow their businesses, and achieve their goals. You can learn more about our services on our website or contact us today to start the conversation.