Would invite critical (+/-) comments on new site which is nearing completion.
Owen Chubb Landscapers - Maintenance
Thanks
Owen Chubb Landscapers - Maintenance
Thanks
Site Review
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davidbehan
New Member
Nice site. Looks well. Couple of little things I'd personally change:
- you need to get actual text (and not images) onto the home page. SE's rank that page the highest usually so it needs to be optimised for SE's. Basically you've got a splash page there - a big no no!
- navigation should change to text and away from the images also. you can create the exact same effect with plain text and a little css.
- I'd change the background colour or add a tile so that the actual site lifts off the page a bit and distinguishes itself from the bg.
- I'd avoid using popup windows for the full size images. They are just annoying and can be blocked. Have a look at lightbox2, it's great for this sort of thing: Lightbox 2
- link logo back to home page and when linking to your home page, always use the full url only. Don't include index.htm at the end. It operates as a duplicate page as far as the SE's are concerned.
- The "shop" popup window - how annoying is that. Can you not put that inside the current design? What's the point of it? Once again, avoid popups like the plague!
- There's W3C (html/css) and WAI errors. Best run it through some standards checking. Look up TotalValidator for a good tool.
- You really should be looking at doing your sites in "table-less" designs. It's so much easier when you make the move over and your code will be so much cleaner and readable by the SE's.
Other than those points, the site is quite nice. It looks well and it loads fast going from page to page. I actually like the home page with the logo in the middle but it's a big no no when it comes to SEO.
Well, hope that helps!
Rgds, Dave
- you need to get actual text (and not images) onto the home page. SE's rank that page the highest usually so it needs to be optimised for SE's. Basically you've got a splash page there - a big no no!
- navigation should change to text and away from the images also. you can create the exact same effect with plain text and a little css.
- I'd change the background colour or add a tile so that the actual site lifts off the page a bit and distinguishes itself from the bg.
- I'd avoid using popup windows for the full size images. They are just annoying and can be blocked. Have a look at lightbox2, it's great for this sort of thing: Lightbox 2
- link logo back to home page and when linking to your home page, always use the full url only. Don't include index.htm at the end. It operates as a duplicate page as far as the SE's are concerned.
- The "shop" popup window - how annoying is that. Can you not put that inside the current design? What's the point of it? Once again, avoid popups like the plague!
- There's W3C (html/css) and WAI errors. Best run it through some standards checking. Look up TotalValidator for a good tool.
- You really should be looking at doing your sites in "table-less" designs. It's so much easier when you make the move over and your code will be so much cleaner and readable by the SE's.
Other than those points, the site is quite nice. It looks well and it loads fast going from page to page. I actually like the home page with the logo in the middle but it's a big no no when it comes to SEO.
Well, hope that helps!
Rgds, Dave
davidbehan
New Member
this is what I reviewed
Forbairt
Teaching / Designing / Developing
have you changed the dns on the site ? if so it hasn't changed over yet ?
The Druid Valley Design account has been suspended as well ? though you may know about that ?
Other than that pretty much everything david mentioned ... I also like it when logos take me back to home pages ... I kinda expect it
The Druid Valley Design account has been suspended as well ? though you may know about that ?
Other than that pretty much everything david mentioned ... I also like it when logos take me back to home pages ... I kinda expect it
davidbehan
New Member
No worries! It was 3am when I posted and my eyes were hurting staring at code!
I'm really interested to see what the upgrade looks like as the old site was nice enough!
I'm really interested to see what the upgrade looks like as the old site was nice enough!
Forbairt
Teaching / Designing / Developing
Forbairt
Teaching / Designing / Developing
quick look ...
the owen chubb ... logo looks slightly wrong ...
The images on each of the pages ... load fairly slowly ...
Your background image the green ... on the left hand side looks quite pixilated ...
Hmmm seems like overuse of background images for menu items as such they don't scale up nicely. recently I've started making a lot of use of ctrl + when viewing websites ... ( maybe I'm growing old ) as such I'm not sure if its breaking some useability guidelines ... (but that is a bit of a technical / useability issue as opposed to an actual fault on the site)
Its not exactly an online shop ... its an online catalog ?
You don't have their business number on the site ...
No link to your own website ?
Hmm... personally I'm not sure about it .. having seen the previous version ... it had a more friendly feel .. this has a more professional feel to it .... which may or may not be a bad thing depending on how you look at it ... but as I said its my personal feeling on it
the owen chubb ... logo looks slightly wrong ...
The images on each of the pages ... load fairly slowly ...
Your background image the green ... on the left hand side looks quite pixilated ...
Hmmm seems like overuse of background images for menu items as such they don't scale up nicely. recently I've started making a lot of use of ctrl + when viewing websites ... ( maybe I'm growing old
) as such I'm not sure if its breaking some useability guidelines ... (but that is a bit of a technical / useability issue as opposed to an actual fault on the site)Its not exactly an online shop ... its an online catalog ?
You don't have their business number on the site ...
No link to your own website ?
Hmm... personally I'm not sure about it .. having seen the previous version ... it had a more friendly feel .. this has a more professional feel to it .... which may or may not be a bad thing depending on how you look at it ... but as I said its my personal feeling on it
quick look ...
the owen chubb ... logo looks slightly wrong ...
The images on each of the pages ... load fairly slowly ...
Your background image the green ... on the left hand side looks quite pixilated ...
Hmmm seems like overuse of background images for menu items as such they don't scale up nicely. recently I've started making a lot of use of ctrl + when viewing websites ... ( maybe I'm growing old
Its not exactly an online shop ... its an online catalog ?
You don't have their business number on the site ...
No link to your own website ?
Hmm... personally I'm not sure about it .. having seen the previous version ... it had a more friendly feel .. this has a more professional feel to it .... which may or may not be a bad thing depending on how you look at it ... but as I said its my personal feeling on it
Thanks - quick response:
Logo- yeah something doesn't look right.
Image loading- agree but how can this be improved?
BG Colour- required effect, a bit subjective, but it's colour!
Bus Nr - on CONTACT page
Online Cat - agree, but SHOP sounds better(?) and more prods to be added to catalogue very soon
Pro Look v Friendly Look - I was hoping for both but in the crunch, opt for Pro rather than Ffriendly and new site expected to look and function better than old site.
Lets see what else come up. But thanks for that Forbairt.
Forbairt
Teaching / Designing / Developing
Image loading speeds is mostly down to your hosting provider ... I've not checked out who it is (just did ... and its hosting365 ...) .. I don't think its an issue wiht hosting365 ... I think its an issue with the images being 150kB in size each ... you have a lot of the image you're not using ... why ? by chopping out the bits you're not using you can easily save yourself 75kB ... also decrease the compression you are using ...
if you're not sure how .. feel free to post in the new graphic design sub section you can also have a photoshop batch job do this for you ... load directory of images .. resize ... and hey presto it'll read in 500000 images and resize to your requirements
You may also be able to use some ajaxy goodness .. didn't check if you were or not in the page ...
Did notice slightly weird javascript in the bottom of your page for google analytics ? ... are you actually using https on your site ?
if you're not sure how .. feel free to post in the new graphic design sub section
you can also have a photoshop batch job do this for you ... load directory of images .. resize ... and hey presto it'll read in 500000 images and resize to your requirements You may also be able to use some ajaxy goodness .. didn't check if you were or not in the page ...
Did notice slightly weird javascript in the bottom of your page for google analytics ? ... are you actually using https on your site ?
is nice but still a lot of essential things missing (e.g. href title tag)
Images: make thumbnails and only onclick display the large one, this way you can have all of them onto one page.
I understand the green colours of your choice but I do think is too much of it. You can find a different matching colour for the background.
Logo as it was said not clear enough.
Images: make thumbnails and only onclick display the large one, this way you can have all of them onto one page.
I understand the green colours of your choice but I do think is too much of it. You can find a different matching colour for the background.
Logo as it was said not clear enough.
Thanks for the feedback guys and before responding just to clarify I'm from the client side of the project but my interest is for feedback to identify any particular issues (technical/graphic) with the new site that might give rise to underperformance or enhance overall performance.
I am not involved in website development and lack the technical competence, however our objective is to create a site that is free of any obvious serious technical flaws and offering a good user experience.
Responding to previous posts:
Firstly Forbairt,
I am not involved in website development and lack the technical competence, however our objective is to create a site that is free of any obvious serious technical flaws and offering a good user experience.
Responding to previous posts:
Firstly Forbairt,
- image loading - good point would be very interested in reducing the image loading time. Will follow up here.
- not familiar with ajaxy goodness, perhaps you might clarify
- google analytics- is being used on site. AFAIK this is a commonly used piece of tracking SW, but wasn't aware of any problems? Are there?
- using https on site ? - must check but again what's the significance?
- a lot of essential things missing (eg href title tag) - this concerns me, can you please elaborate
- Images - beieve you me, we did agonise over this and despite having used thumbnails previously, there was no clear answer, in the end consensus came (probably in favour of change) down to one large image per page.
- BG colour - take your point but might wait for a wider response before changing the background colour from green.
- logo -will make more clear.
run your website through this project : SEO Website Analyzer Project and it will point out some of the things that you might want to look into.
the "title" href tag is the text that shows up when you put your mouse over a text link
(e.g. [href='link_to_the_page.html' [B]title[/B]='link description']anchor text[/a])
the "title" href tag is the text that shows up when you put your mouse over a text link
(e.g. [href='link_to_the_page.html' [B]title[/B]='link description']anchor text[/a])
Forbairt
Teaching / Designing / Developing
The strange code I was seeing has been explained on another thread ... Its been updated by google recently enough and I haven't included any analytics code in a few weeks hence I wasn't aware of the update
Just thought I'd give some update/feedback. A couple of months on and Google Analytics is proving to be a very helpful tool for analysing 'web traffic' visitor behaviour (sources, referrals, page views etc etc). We're still in development mode, adding more features and content but we're happy with the SEO data to-date, scoring high in several keyword areas.
With vistors typically viewing 30+ pages over 9 minutes, we're happy content/presentation appears to be working.
Plenty of unsolicited feedback on graphics all without any exception has been very positive, some even glowing.
More features to be added Blog is iminent, then Virtual Tours (to feature Project Before and Afters) and Shop, but some nicer stuff later.
Anyone care to comment/advice on +/- on Virtual Tours ?
With vistors typically viewing 30+ pages over 9 minutes, we're happy content/presentation appears to be working.
Plenty of unsolicited feedback on graphics all without any exception has been very positive, some even glowing.
More features to be added Blog is iminent, then Virtual Tours (to feature Project Before and Afters) and Shop, but some nicer stuff later.
Anyone care to comment/advice on +/- on Virtual Tours ?
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