review of www.eccabinets.com please

[JoeBallantine]

Hi

I'm not a pro website designer although I have worked as a computer programmer, I now work as a custom furniture maker.

I'd be very interested in comments about my site
Custom Made Pine Furniture & Kitchens - East Coast Cabinets, Wicklow & Dublin, Ireland.

I'm not hoping to win design awards or make money with Google Adsense, I just want to sell furniture. That's why I don't mind using tables for layout and leaving it all hanging out!

Check out the google cache for some really crap pages that have now been updated. I get good google results for terms like 'custom made pine furniture wicklow' or 'custom wardrobes ireland'.

Site was updated by me in June, 2006 using css for style.

Cheers
Joe

 

[RedCardinal]

Hi

I'm not a pro website designer although I have worked as a computer programmer, I now work as a custom furniture maker.

I'd be very interested in comments about my site
Custom Made Pine Furniture & Kitchens - East Coast Cabinets, Wicklow & Dublin, Ireland.

I'm not hoping to win design awards or make money with Google Adsense, I just want to sell furniture. That's why I don't mind using tables for layout and leaving it all hanging out!

Check out the google cache for some really crap pages that have now been updated. I get good google results for terms like 'custom made pine furniture wicklow' or 'custom wardrobes ireland'.

Site was updated by me in June, 2006 using css for style.

Cheers
Joe

Ok, my honesty hat is going on so I may as well start with my usual discalimer that my comments aren't meant to cause any insult.

First thing - well done you have written 100% valid markup. You have included the META tags (although I would probably think a little about your keywords content).

Next I would say is that your pages need more structure for good readability, usability and findability. The first thing that struck me was that the page seems very cluttered and I wasn't sure where to look first. I know you are using tables to give structure but sometimes different fonts, colors (I mis-spell because I code ), backgrounds etc will grab attention. What do you want viewers to see first? Decide your message and highlight it - contrast (differnet colors) on the page is a great way to grab attention.

OK just a tick I just looked at your search page. You want to remove that common mis-spelling list right away. Search engines will probably tag this as spam and hurt your site ranking.

I think you should be careful when leaving it 'all hang out'. Nothing wrong with tables per se but I have a 1400px display and your table is stretching to my screen. Maybe have a think about how to layout and position various items on the page also. You could turn off the borders and give the cells some padding to break things up a bit.

On the keywords front there are certain things I think you should do to improve your site. Have a think about what people would enter into Google to find what you do. Maybe ask a few people who know nothing about your trade what they would type into Google if they were looking for pine furniture.

I think maybe 'custom made pine furniture wicklow' wont be searched for. Maybe 'custom pine furniture ireland'? 'pine furniture ireland'? 'hand made furniture ireland'? 'handmade furniture ireland'? Anyhow you should try and get your keywords into your title tags and also <hX> tags.
You could also rename your pages with your keywords e.g pine-furniture-ireland.php.

Hope some of the above is useful.

 

[JoeBallantine]

Hi rgh
I agree with many of your points. I think my site is very messy and lacks cohesion but it's too difficult to redo completely. I am planning to do a new site using css for style and layout and it'll be completely dynamic with a backend MySQL database. I don't want to redo the existing site as I'll lose google rankings and the URL isn't great. With CSS it should be relatively easy to do up a completely new site and then I'll have both, each with a different focus and different products.

On what people enter into Google when looking for furniture I can't hope to get good results unless 'Wicklow', 'Dublin' or 'Ireland' is entered, otherwise 'furniture' is too highly contested a keyword. But I'd hope to rank well for 'furniture' along with dublin, wicklow or ireland. When I search for things I always try to enter very specific keywords to get relevant results but most people don't. I was number 1 in MSN for the single word 'mattresses' even though it only appears on my site about twice! I made a big mistake by calling the site 'East Coast Cabinets' instead of 'Custom Furniture' as I do very well for the word cabinets.

I use Free Search Engine Ranking & Keyword Tracker / Keyword Ranking Tool / SEO Rank : Search Engine Position Analysis Report (DigitalPoint) to check my position on searchengines for particular phrases, it's very good. (I didn't enter the link above as it appears, it seems to do that automatically.)

I have submitted to about 300 directories using Firefox autofill extensions and a long list.

When I first did the site in July, 2005 I had few skills and it was very basic. Since then I have learnt more HTML, mid level php and basic css. Up until June 2006 I had all my text in <p> tags, not a <h1> in sight (or site ha ha) which was a complete disaster. (Thanks digitalPoint forum)

The reason I went with the misspelling list was because once I misspelled furniture and a site came up which included the misspelling and no sites with correct spellings came up...

Cheers
Joe

 

[RedCardinal]

Hi Joe

Well done on promoting your site - you seem to have a very good grasp on the basic requirements.

I don't want to redo the existing site as I'll lose google rankings and the URL isn't great.

You can easily change the style of a page without affecting your rankings - just try not to change too much text. In fact, you could probably slightly improve your rankings by moving away from tables.

You should look into using 301 redirects (I think there might be a tutorial here about that) - this way you can change the page names and retain your rankings.

Don't worry about the URL - I've worked with some really obscure non-word URLs and not had any trouble.

I made a big mistake by calling the site 'East Coast Cabinets' instead of 'Custom Furniture' as I do very well for the word cabinets.

Not sure what you mean by this? The only thing that you cannot change is the domain name - everythng else can be changed. You should try tweaking things a little. Change the page title and wait a week or two to see what happens on Google (the reason I say wait a week or two is that I dont think Googlebot will spider your site too frequently). If your worried about what you should / shouldn't change PM me and I will try to tell you what will happen if you change x or y.

On what people enter into Google when looking for furniture I can't hope to get good results unless 'Wicklow', 'Dublin' or 'Ireland' is entered, otherwise 'furniture' is too highly contested a keyword.

You're correct. However people generally use about 3 words on average in their search phrases so be mindful of this.

But I'd hope to rank well for 'furniture' along with dublin, wicklow or ireland.

Good tactic. Maybe also try for 'handmade furniture dublin', 'pine furniture dublin', 'custom furniture dubin' with 'ireland' derviatives.

I have to say that technically you've done well. I think with a bit of styling you should be on your way to having a succssful website.


Rgds

Richard

ps digitalpoint keyword tracker is an absolute gem

 

[grandad]

Hi Joe,

I saw this thread last night and was going to post, but Richard got in ahead of me and said exactlly what I was going to say! Even down to congratulating you on your coding.

However there is one thing I would add to the discussion -
All the talk so far has been about SEO as if that is the be all and end all of websites. There is another more important factor though and that is the impact of the site on the visitor.

There is no point in getting great SE rankings, if the visitor is put off by the site itself. My first impression of the site was that I got too much information and it was too difficult to read. Therefore, as a casual visitor I would lose interest. As a designer, I got the impression that the text was written with SEO in mind, rather than trying to get your message across to the visitor.

Try and look at the site from the viewpoint of someone who is visiting the site for the first time. Are they going to read all that text, or is it going to put them off? As your prime function is selling furtinure, have a few more thumbnail images of your products on the front page. They will sell the message better than text.

Richard [not to be confused with Richard]

 

[mneylon]

There is no point in getting great SE rankings, if the visitor is put off by the site itself. My first impression of the site was that I got too much information and it was too difficult to read. Therefore, as a casual visitor I would lose interest. As a designer, I got the impression that the text was written with SEO in mind, rather than trying to get your message across to the visitor.
Richard [not to be confused with Richard]

That's a very valid point.

Finding the right balance between the visuals for the end user and the text / meta / semantic etc., for the robots is not easy

 

[JoeBallantine]

Hi

Yes, my site does contain all the text just so that it gets good search engine rankings, I just crammed all the keywords in, don't forget I'm an amatuer and that's the only way I knew how.
I'm just hoping that the genuine customers stay and ignore the text. Once you get off the main page to one of the subpages with all the thumbnails I should be ok. I put up with crap sites if they have the products I want.

Good point by richardo to have more thumbnails on the main page to generate interest. Originally I only had about twenty crap pictures and I made thumbnails 250px tall... I now have over 100 pictures and all thumbnails are reduced to 150px tall so I can fit more on the pages. As I make new furniture I always take pictures, process them and put them on the site. That's the problem I'm facing with the site, it doesn't expand well, that's why I have to go dynamic, use css for layout and style, may as well do a new site rather than try to make this one work. CSS is so powerful I think it's as handy to do a new site.

As I do custom furniture I will have hundreds of pictures in the future and I have to process the pics so I can have them in display books in my workshop so I may as well have them on the net as well. I also have many ideas which I just can't implement convieniently on the current site and the structure of the current site is too fixed.
What I mean is that the current pages are split by furniture type, furniture could also be split by rooms in the house, or by finish, i.e handpainted or lacquered, or split by quality and cost, or split by style as in Shaker, Georgian, modern etc, or split by material, i.e pine, hardwoods, MDF... it doesn't seem possible to do this unless I go dynamic).

Thanks for all the help, some great ideas there which I will work on... I'll be back in a few months with the new site .

Incidentally I get about 1200 uniques a month which I'm happy with, it generates about 20 to 30 real enquiries a month which is good, I have no high street showroom and all my buisness comes over the web. Uniques are rising all the time as well, was <300 in Dec, 2005.

Cheers
Joe