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emily morgans
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What do you think of my website ?? - 11/12/2007 3:52:50
Hi, I am new to the forum and to be honest websites in general. I am looking for a critique of my website www.barringtonhomes.eu
I am struggling with the SEO and want to make sure the site is user friendly and working correctly etc. Does anyone have any top tips for me ?
Thanks.
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William Lee
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RE: What do you think of my website ?? - 11/12/2007 6:03:02
At the bottom, the copyright line and another line is out of whack with the rest. Might as well center the 2 lines.
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William Lee
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emily morgans
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RE: What do you think of my website ?? - 11/12/2007 10:47:37
Thanks for the feedback. I have centred the copyright text.
What i am really looking / hoping for it any suggestions of how to achieve a better page rank and also and positive / ngative feedback about the look and "user friendliness" of the site.
All suggestions welcome.
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d a v e
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RE: What do you think of my website ?? - 11/12/2007 11:49:19
you have a typo
'advise' should be 'advice' (first page first line)
don't make the links bold on hover - it's damn annoying when text jumps around like that
why are all the links at the bottom and not say on the left? or is that just to stuff in some keywords?
the other, 'main links could be bigger
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David Prescott
Gekko web design
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Tailslide
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RE: What do you think of my website ?? - 11/12/2007 12:38:52
You should get rid of those scrolling red bits of text - the effect of the scratchy scrolling plus the red against the blue is actually painful to look at.
If you want a slideshow for the large banner image on the inner pages then you'd either be better off going for a javascript slideshow or using a flash implementation like UFO or SWFObject as at the moment you get a blank white rectangle in IE and you have to click to activate it.
There are other bits that only seem to work in IE (like the prices from thing - which again would be much better as just plain text - movement, unless done really well, tends to look cheap).
The downloadable pricelists should really probably be PDFs rather than HTML pages (which look like they've been copied from Word or Excel) for many reasons. Probably the best one is that they're not easily printable as they are (they only print part of the page). And if you do make them PDFs you should warn people that that's what they are (either in the title attribute or just say it in brackets in the download link).
You need to go through and check for errors because there are a few - for example, on the Inspection page, the whole text acts as though it's a link - looks like an unclosed link tag. There are a lot of coding errors in there. The navigation link effects are different on some pages.
Generally the layout of most of the site looks fine to me (also not keen on the splash page with the links at the bottom) but the implementation needs refining to ensure that it's easy to use for people.
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"My strategy is so simple an idiot could have devised it"
Little Blue Plane Web Design | Blood, Sweat & Rust - A Land Rover restoration project
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emily morgans
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RE: What do you think of my website ?? - 11/12/2007 13:56:03
Thats great. Thanks a lot.
Dave - I didnt know why the links kept jumping and it was annoying me too ! I will change that. The bottom links were just to add keywords (i thought it was a good idea?)
I will change the typo. Thanks for you time to have a look at the site.
Tailslide - Thanks for the feedback. I will review all the styling suggestions you made (starting with the annoying, cheap ones...ha ha).
Any pointers regarding the lot of coding errors.
lots of wasted / irrelavent code ? Not search engine Friendly ? To be honest i read SEO for Dummies and i thought i had implemented all their tips (or am i the dummy!?!)
thanks again for helping a struggling but keen web designer x
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Tailslide
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RE: What do you think of my website ?? - 11/12/2007 14:29:06
As far as the errors go - have a look at the W3C validator and run the site through page by page. You'll get a frightening amount of errors back BUT you'll find that if you correct an error - quite a few will disappear so it might not be as bad as it first looks. The first error would be adding the closing "/>" on one of your meta tags. Having 100% correct code won't necessarily make your site better or more sucessfull BUT it's good practice plus it will help you spot errors like that paragraph that's currently acting like a giant link.
Well my own personal SEO technique (and I'm certainly no expert!) is to use CSS layouts rather than tables because it means that Google will be able to read more of the page and get more content than with all the extra stuff in a table layout. My understanding is that Google doesn't actually read the lot - it reads a certain amount of the page - so you want to get your important key phrases in early which CSS allows you as you basically just have the content and basic tags on the page (no extra formatting, no extra table cell tags etc). There are people who dispute this approach though.
I use the H1 tag to indicate the most imporant key phrase (basically the main heading) on each page as Google loves the H1 tag - I make sure it appears early on in the page code and that it appears only once (otherwise it's importance gets diluted).
Apart from that, you want good but not spammy page titles and lots of relevant content (which I think you've got).
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"My strategy is so simple an idiot could have devised it"
Little Blue Plane Web Design | Blood, Sweat & Rust - A Land Rover restoration project
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emily morgans
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RE: What do you think of my website ?? - 11/13/2007 3:47:58
Thats great advice. Thanks very much.
I will certainly do everything you have suggested and hopefully see the results. I dont really understand CSS's but i will have a look at it.
Thanks for taking the time to do this for me.
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michaelea
Posts: 49
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From: Cannon Beach, US West
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RE: What do you think of my website ?? - 11/13/2007 12:32:39
The pictures don't work for me ....
The little ones are too small and the big one is too big!
I'm sure the little one's are great pictures - let's see them like that - maybe if you Float them left (class="float: left;") with 1 at the beginning of each text paragraph or, make a Header band of say 760 x 90 with 4 or 5 of the pictures in the band.
Let's see those nice pictures you've got and make me want to see more of them.
Also, lose the text centering and make it justified instead or left-justified. Centering is not appealing to my eye.
For SEO, as Tailslide mentioned, H1 is good (4 or 5 words) followed by a couple of H2's is good too. I would also make the meta Title Tag shorter and make it relevant to the individual page.
<--- my two bits worth!
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emily morgans
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RE: What do you think of my website ?? - 11/14/2007 16:04:07
Stuck at the 1st hurdle.....
Just ran the site through WC3 validator as suggested....i am a bit confused..should my DOCTYPE declaration be the following code (and it should be at the very top of the coding right ?)
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
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Tailslide
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RE: What do you think of my website ?? - 11/14/2007 16:25:31
That looks like a valid DOCTYPE and yes it should be the very first thing on the page - no spaces at all before it.
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"My strategy is so simple an idiot could have devised it"
Little Blue Plane Web Design | Blood, Sweat & Rust - A Land Rover restoration project
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