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youngtag

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Hi Folks, I've recently launched a new website - Festivals.ie - Festivals in Ireland, UK and Europe - as this is my first ever attempt at launching a site I'm keen for some independent feedback. Friends tell me "it's pretty good" but that's not exactly a rigorous analysis, so I'm hoping those with experience might have some constructive criticism for me. I feel a but guilty about just joining the forum and looking for free advice without giving anything in return so I am resolving to at least try and help somebody else to balance the books. Many Thanks
 

Byron

New Member
Hi youngtag,

Overall it's very impressive, I would just be catious about things like the Google Map API slowing the loading of navigation, this may annoy people browsing around, lowering JS below the menu, maybe to page end may help. Also an initial reaction would be to use actual festival images or stock images in your frontpage scroller. Also install Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools - you'll see why after a while of using them!

Other than that, you'll learn the rest over time / hacking away at stuff.
 

youngtag

New Member
Thanks for the feedback Byron, it's appreciated. I'm in full agreement about the page loading speed of maps. It's too slow at the moment and analytics (which I have installled), is showing that a fair few people are dropping off at that stage, so it's an issue we need to tackle. I'd much prefer to get page load speed down as opposed to getting rid of the map because it's a key part of the site, so my brother and I are working away at optimising techniques. "lowering JS below the menu, maybe to page end may help" - can you explain that part please?? I hear you on the festival images, we did have some before launch but decided to keep the carousel nav to the key parts of the site to keep things simple. In time I'm sure we will have more festival images, but there's other stuff like SEO and marketing that are more of a priority at the moment. Thanks again. Festivals.ie - Festivals in Ireland, UK and Europe
 

philip82

New Member
I like it alot!

May I suggest you use a little more padding OR margin around your sidebar and some more vertical margin around your elements. I would just use a line height of 1.4 by default maybe, and 1.6 on the paragraph's/blockquote's etc.

On a technical note, you have six H1 tags, you should really only have one and you have zero h2 tags. H1,H2,H3 tags should be used for targeting your SEO as well as the TITLE tag. Throw some more(two or three)keywords into your title for each page and present them first just for the end user sake. 'keyword1, keyword2, keyword3 | mysite.com'.

Also I noticed you have duplicate ID's, those should be unique to the element/tag.
Your also missing some alt tags from your images(alt tags here can add to the SEO value, so add in some keywords also).

Good Job, keep going with it.
 

youngtag

New Member
Brilliant Philip, thanks a million - I had one or two of those in the pipeline but great to get validation that these strategies are the right things to do.

Thanks again, I really appreciate it. :biggrin:
 

DomainMagnate

New Member
Very nice site, agree with philip82, more than one h1 tag is excessive, use h2 and h3 instead.
Other than that all really looks great, well done with the design!
 

Niall Murtagh

New Member
Thanks DM, lots done, lots more to do. Next festival season going to be important to see whether this is going to fly commercially. Cheers.
 
O

OpenDev

Guest
this is a really nice looking site - BUT the eye flow is kinda hard 0 dont know where to look or what to click on.. Try and use a eye Path indicator and direct people to what they are supposed to do.
 

youngtag

New Member
this is a really nice looking site - BUT the eye flow is kinda hard 0 dont know where to look or what to click on.. Try and use a eye Path indicator and direct people to what they are supposed to do.

Thanks very much for the feedback. Good idea with eyeflow, it's on the list! To be honest, there needs to be a bit of a re-design. Not a complete overhaul, but the user journey, as you point out, needs to be signposted better.

Cheers!
 
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