Hi fellow designers and affiliates. I'm really struggling to make my customer understand a few basic things about web design. I'm not perfect myself but I have been doing this for quite some years. However, the company currently has its website done by a friend of the family. The marketing manager, who contacted me, wants something better.

Whatever I propose, whatever advice I give them (design, SEO...), they keep referring to their old website as better. But please do me a favour and have a look at indawo.biz. I'm not spamming here, god knows I wouldn't want to get that website out there. Go through it in a few minutes and tell me your honest opinion: is that website awful or not?

What's wrong with it? You can be brief, I don't want to take to much time of you.

Many, many thanks in advance.

Well... I can't seem to load the website, it seems as if the dns is down.

Hi CodeJoust. Thanks for having a look. Apparently it got so bad that the site went down. It is back online now.

The animated gif could more informative

also you must show the structural details redecorating in more details

also you could add flashy navigation bar with brushes etc

OK...
A few notes:
1 : The text bar at the bottom listing everything needs to be made into a css sprites navbar or an image map. People like clickability, or you can just remove it. You'll also get much better seo having tons of good keywords (make sure they link to a few different pages, or different headers on one page (page.html#headerid)
2 : Add a little padding to the bottom of the text on the inner pages.
3 : Slow down the initial slideshow or use something like innerFade to switch it. It's slightly jarring.
4 : Use Descriptive - Changing title tags, and use meta tags... if possible. (meta tags are good for the contextual previews, not for highering the pagerank).
5 : Nice job! With the design. Try to make the headers actually within header tags, not p tags for seo purposes.

Thanks for your comments. This site was not made by me, but that other guy. Personally, I don't like the design. CodeJoust, all your remarks are very true. Now it seems that I have to explain this to the management, which is the real challenge. Thanks again.