Critique a site I'm working on please
-
Hi guys,
I have a list of things to do on this website that is longer than my arm but thought I would gather a few more thoughts on the site before moving on further with it.
The site is here. It went live a couple of days ago for live testing.
I have a news section coming very soon at theworkplacedepot.co.uk/news - it is in live testing now.
One glaring issue for me is that some of the products simply aren't "buyable". What I mean by that is that the options are too vague and too vast - as an outsider I wouldnt have a clue what I was buying!
Other issues:
- The banner at the bottom of the HP is a test - its design will be changing.
- The sitemap has some issues and will be addressed.
- There is no area yet to "log-in".
However, critique for me pretty please!
-
I wouldn't even know what a "starter bay" or "extension bay" was. I also think there are WAY too many options.
If you are involved in the hospitality industry you would think you'd understand what these terms mean, having said that would those terms be specific to a UK audience? For example, I'm in Australia (I have a fast food business background from a previous life) and we would just call them shelving or store room shelving. The starter bay, we'd call it a "return". I ask this question because I noticed that your client does take orders from outside mainland UK.
You are right about having too many options. That is a lot of stock that the client is carrying.
-
Thanks for the reply.
The black backround is ok for he menu, but having a black backround on the other boxes headers puts them on he same level of importance, which I don' think is ok.
Thats a good point actually. I had a similar thought. If you check the menu headers on this page, I think this is how I will have them changed on the home page - all apart from the main one.
The main focus of the page is on FREE DELIVERY and PRICE MATCH and no on the mai banner.
Agreed. I have the design team working on two new banners for these as they draw your eyes away from the key areas.
Thanks for your thoughts Some good suggestions there!
-
Hi Matt,
I think that you have a decent website there, as a general suggestion I might say: focus.
Home Page
The black backround is ok for the menu, but having a black backround on the other boxes headers puts them on he same level of importance, which I don' think is ok.
The main focus of the page is on FREE DELIVERY and PRICE MATCH and not on the mai banner
I know that these messages are important but it shouldn't keep me away from the main message.
Content Page
The same here for the boxes header.
If your product has only one option it's difficult for me to see the add button.
Suggestions:
1. Put more focus on the homepage banner by adding some colour on the background and changing the black background header.
2. On the product page change the black background from the tabs, product option header.
3. Having the images on a background (not white) will put more focus on the product.
I hope this helps
Cornel
-
20,000 products... scary!
"Is the banner under the header going to be a sliding gallery style design or fixed?Just showing 3-4 offers maybe? Just thinking out loud! "
Yeah, we have a design team here working on 3 banners, they slide across
"The only other comment for changing I would make is the header is too busy. I'd move the search bar to above the green 'Free delivery" image on the right of the page. In it's place I would make the phone number much bigger."
I was thinking the same to be honest. I was thinking maybe to reduce the width of the main banner and lift the two smaller banners (free delivery and price match) on the right hand side up a little and add search.
Are you able to give an example of a product that you think isn't 'buyable'?
Sure, here. I wouldn't even know what a "starter bay" or "extension bay" was. I also think there are WAY too many options.
-
Hi Matt,
wow, those are a lot of products!
Is the banner under the header going to be a sliding gallery style design or fixed?Just showing 3-4 offers maybe? Just thinking out loud!
The only other comment for changing I would make is the header is too busy. I'd move the search bar to above the green 'Free delivery" image on the right of the page. In it's place I would make the phone number much bigger.
Are you able to give an example of a product that you think isn't 'buyable'?
cheers
Daiana
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
DNS Prefetching for wordpress site
We have given below as DNS prefetch in our website. CMS is wordpress. Are these okay? I wonder why fonts.googleapis.com is not working. One of our competitors is using youtube. Can we improve it any how?
Web Design | | vtmoz0 -
Best course of action when removing 100's of pages from your site?
We had a section on our site Legal News (we are a law firm). All we did there was rehash news stories from news sites (no original content). We decided to remove the entire Legal News section and we were left with close to 800 404's. Around this same time our rankings seemed to drop. Our webmaster implemented 301's to closely related content on our blog. In about a weeks time our rankings went back up. Our webmaster informed us that we should submit each url to Google for removal, which we did. Its been about three weeks and our Not Found errors in WMT is over 800 and seems to be increasing daily. Moz's crawler says we have only 35 404's and they are from our blog not the legal news section we removed. The last thing we want is to have another rankings drop. Is this normal? What is the best course of action when removing hundreds of pages from your site?
Web Design | | MFC0 -
Wordpress Blog Providing SEO to Main Site
Hi, I recently started a very much "learn on the job" SEO position, transitioning from a copywriting background. We currently have a wordpress blog up and running (and producing some decent quality content too I hope!) at example.com/blog/ and a sign up page located at example.com (sorry, can't put the address right now) for a site that is being custom built as it's got some nifty software linking to back end systems. My question is whether the content on the blog will bring SEO benefits to the main domain or whether it'll just be for the blog itself? If the latter, should we navigate the blog onto the a separate page of the main site? Thanks so much! I'm learning as much as I can as quickly as I can, but somethings still get me in a little bit of a tizzy.
Web Design | | LeahHutcheon0 -
WordPress not man enough...has anybody got experience working with Pryo CMS?
Hey folks I'm working with a small team on putting together a new niche accommodation / holiday search portal here in the UK. We are most likely using PHP / MySQL technology for the site - I am a huge fan of WordPress but not sure its quite man enough for the task (many option search over 10,000 plus properties). We can't afford to pay for a bespoke development, so off-the shelf CMS is the most likely route for release 1, and from what I've been reading Pyro CMS seems a good open source choice... https://www.pyrocms.com/ Has anybody come across this, or know how good it is with regards to on-site SEO? Or maybe WordPress is up to the task? If not, what are other good open source options for sites focused around a search function? Cheers Simon
Web Design | | SCL-SEO0 -
Site Review Please
A few weeks back I posted a question regarding a client's website and the very high Bounce Rate. We were looking at about 70 to 80% BR. The site was rough, and so I asked for some feedback that can be seen here: http://www.seomoz.org/q/high-bounce-rate-on-this-specific-page Since that time we've changed the WP Theme and the client would like specific feedback from the SEO experts. The BR has dropped by roughly 53% over the past month since we changed things, as traffic has risen by roughly 20%. We have lost some rankings for our targeted keywords, even as nothing has greatly changed on the site other than the theme. But even as we've lost some rankings for targeted keywords, we've gained for others and increased traffic dramatically. So, what do you think of the new site? Any feedback would be greatly appreciated. Thank you! http://EraseDisease.com
Web Design | | Linwright0 -
How SEO friendly (or unfriendly) this site structure is
We have a client who wants a site structure like this http://thethomasoliverband.com/home - try to scroll down on the content and see how the url of the site changes. Would there be any problems on trying to SEO this type of structure?
Web Design | | paulct0 -
Multiple Sites, multiple locations similar / duplicate content
I am working with a business that wants to rank in local searches around the country for the same service. So they have websites such as OURSITE-chicago.com and OURSITE-seattle.com -- All of these sites are selling the same services, but with small variations in each state due to different legal standards in the state. The current strategy is to put up similar "local" websites with all the same content. So the bottom line is that we have a few different sites with the same content. The business wants to go national and is planning a different website for each location. In my opinion the duplicate content is a real problem. Unfortunately the nature of the service makes it so that there aren't many ways to say the same thing on each site 50 times without duplicate content. Rewriting content for each state seems like a daunting task when you have 70+ pages per site. So, from an SEO standpoint we have considered: Using the canonocalization tag on all but the central site... I think this would hurt all of the websites SERPs because none will have unique content. Having a central site with directories OURSITE.com/chicago -- but this creates a problem because we need to link back to the relevant content in the main site and ALSO have the unique "Chicago" content easily accessable to Chicago users while having Seattle users able to access their Seattle data. The best way we thought to do this was using a frame with a universal menu and a unique state based menu... Also not a good option because of frames will also hurt SEO. Rewrite all the same content 50 times. You can see why none of these are desirable options. But I know that plenty of websites have "state maps" on their main site. Is there a way to accomplish this in a way that doesn't make our copywriter want to kill us?
Web Design | | SysAdmin190 -
Turning my Design Business site into a site to promote SEO
I need advice on retooling my website for my SEO biz. I have shifted my business model from graphic designer who does websites, to "internet marketing consultant who does graphics too". My main website and domain name is over 10 years old, so I've made the decision to keep it, even though it has no keywords in the name. The name works well for the new business, otherwise. The site has a PR3 and I rank well for small business advertising terms, which gets me graphic design business. I intend to keep doing graphic design, but that is a smaller part of my income. I had considered making 3 satellite sites with keyword domain names to cover my offerings of graphic design SEO, website development, and internet marketing. But am leaning against it for several reasons (that all of us SEO's know) but mainly the fact that I cannot keep up with both working for my clients and blogging on multiple sites and link building for multiple sites. So my question is (you knew there was one coming, right?), what is the best approach to building categories of web development, internet marketing, and SEO into my existing graphic design/advertising oriented website? This is slightly embarrassing to ask as an SEO, but given the multiple approaches possible, and knowing the importance of doing it right the first time, it's best to get an consensus perspective on the BEST approach. My main concerns are the navigation system and the links from the homepage into the site. I have too many pages I've identified as essential to link off of the home page and navigation menus? (Website development, social media marketing, link building, keyword research, pay per click, online advertising, graphic design, brochures, catalogs, Logos, Branding, SEO, keyword research etc.) I've always tried for the ratio of one link off of any page for every 100 words of content. Do I create a home page that is of monster proportions? Do I just have the 4 basic areas linking off the home page then create a "landing zone" of 4 folders and create down from that? I am concerned about URL length as I go deeper with that approach. Or, does it make more sense to have a dozen second-level pages, and not link them all off the home page, and build from beneath (and relying on external juice). Next issue is the nav system. It will be huge. Am I best off just keeping it to 4-6, and creating subnavigation on everypage within the site according to section (PITA)? I've read dozens of blog opinions on how much nav systems do or do not hurt link juice. I've always thought footer links were right next to worthless to pass any juice, but given this situation, does it make sense to make a footer link for each major page (about 20)? Thanks for your opinions.
Web Design | | JCDenver0