Training Website Improvements...
-
Hi Folks,
I'm in the process of going over our corporate website with a view to improving on-page optimisation, layout, design and user experience and I would like your feedback on what you think I should improve or change with respect to SEO. Some of my ideas include:
- Restructure Home Page to Better Show Our Services
- Possibly Add a Slider to the Home Page (I know engagement rates with these are generally low)
- Restructure the Course Pages Completely (https://purplegriffon.com/courses/itil-training/itil-foundation-training/itil-foundation)
- Restructure the Events Pages Completely (https://purplegriffon.com/event/2028/itil-foundation)
- Improve & Streamline the Booking Process
- AJAXIFY the Booking Process
- Improve Responsive Elements
I'm also interested in conducting user testing before I go ahead and make any changes.
What are your thoughts? What would you change? Thanks.
Gaz
-
Hey,
No problem. I appreciate you taking the time to have a look and get back to me.
I've fixed the issue. It was a JavaScript class selector problem but it's all sorted so thanks for spotting that mate.
Cheers
Gaz
-
Okay so the course thing and the special offer, any page that requires you to scroll down to see the complete list, and the click the next page, will always return to you to the top of the page not at the bottom where you actually clicked the next page button.
To replicate the Consultancy issue
Firefox (browser)
- From Homepage Click Consultancy link
- Click Training to bring up the accordion
- Click any option inside the accordion menu to expand it
- Re-click the accordion menu option to collapse it
- Consultancy text disappears
Sorry took me awhile to get back to this post.
IMG: http://i.imgur.com/fRndGJJ.jpg
Hope that helps,
Don
-
Cheers Dude,
Yeah, the special offers is an issue. I'll look in to sorting that or perhaps only show 5 at a time.
Which courses page are you referring to mate please?
The quiz had all the chrome removed in order to offer less distraction for those taking it. That was intentional.
Finally buddy, I can't replicate the issue you're having with the consultancy page. Seems fine to me bud.
Cheers!
-
Looks really good
Couple nit-picky things, on home page when you click special offers (page 2+) the page refreshes but doesn't bring you back to the special areas you have to scroll back down. Same for the courses page. Perhaps these are good places to use anchors. Also the Quiz page is still orphaned. Finally, when you're on the Consultancy page and you open the Training accordion and close it, the consultancy info disappears.
Cheers!
-
OK, you're probably getting bored with this now but other than including a course search on the home page I'm pretty much getting there now and I've made some more adjustments to the nav and fixed up the event and course pages somewhat. Still a bit more to do but we're getting there now.
https://purplegriffon.com - Home Page
https://purplegriffon.com/courses/itil-training/itil-foundation-training/itil-foundation - Course Page
https://purplegriffon.com/event/2028/itil-foundation - Events Page
I've also improved the load time too and it loads in around 1 second now.
-
Thanks dude. I'm still updating and have now added further enhancements and fixed some bugs. I've also reincorporated the special offers. Cheers.
-
I like the accordion for training (your previous biggest navigation hog), I used this style for our jobs page myself.
I like the reduced footer size still too large for me but better.
I noticed your specials were gone from the home page, was that a low engagement item?
Your top navigation is gone on the Free Quiz page which makes that category an orphan
Looks very good overall.
Don
-
I'm slowly improving the layout and design. Let me know your thoughts.
https://purplegriffon.com/ (CTRL + R or CMD + R)
-
Hi Gaz,
I'm glad you found it helpful. I can certainly concede the point about the Google layout I am sure more people find that type of layout pleasant then not, or it wouldn't be so popular.
I think you really have a firm grasp on what to do and it certainly looks like it is going to require some thought. I kind of wish more people gave you some opinions to help you with your future development.
Best of luck,
Don
-
Hey Don,
Thanks for taking the time to look over the website and give me your opinion on it. I appreciate it.
You've hit on some great points in your feedback. That said, I actually like the Google page you linked. I believe there is an argument for using whitespace well. Whether I've achieved that is another matter.
In terms of AJAX, I wanted to make the booking process work on 1 page and reduce the amount of fields the user has to complete, with only those necessary for making a booking. I think this could be streamlined and made in to a faster process for the user. We all hate filling out forms.
The navigation is something that has been nagging at me from day 1. The problem we have though, is we have so many courses and categories, as well as non-course related pages that need to fit together. This needs some careful thought. I would ideally like to combine the 2 navigation elements and make them more straightforward to use. I really need to think about this one.
Fonts and typography is another one for me. It doesn't feel wholly consistent across the site and I feel that this could be improved somewhat.
Anyway, thanks again for your detailed feedback, I very much appreciate it.
Gaz
-
This may be not at all helpful, but I will provide my feedback.
Restructure Home Page to Better Show Our Services. It maybe helpful in your Special Offer section to show details about a particular course / program in a tooltip, then on the corresponding page give some course details, speaker info, training info, and syllabus rundown.
Possibly Add a Slider to the Home Page (I know engagement rates with these are generally low) I'm okay with sliders when done correctly. Keeping content fresh inside them and making them minimal click through. For example Amazon uses them but will only have 4 offers. Anything more then that I think they figured out is not going to get seen.
Restructure the Course Pages Completely (https://purplegriffon.com/courses/itil-training/itil-foundation-training/itil-foundation) Yep agree, more content details as stated above.
Restructure the Events Pages Completely (https://purplegriffon.com/event/2028/itil-foundation). This is actually one of the more informative pages, I will touch on layout (personal opinion only) in closing.
Improve & Streamline the Booking Process & AJAXIFY the Booking Process I didn't find this at all distasteful. Looks good and is smooth. What sort of AJAX calls were you wanting to add? Examples, error checking?
Improve Responsive Elements I don't have much to add here the only responsive element I seen was the Google map.
Okay, now to my personal opinion. First I didn't look at any source code, I didn't evaluate it from an SEO perspective, I only looked at it from a personal engagement point of view. This is where I differ from the modern layouts that have become much more popular as of late. The site in essence reminds me of a Google page like: https://www.google.com/services/?fg=1 and to me that isn't a plus. I understand from a dynamic perspective and the challenges us web designers are up against when trying to make a site that is for all devices. However, huge areas of white space, larger ass footers, over-populated navigation is really a turn off to me. Most people now-a-days have larger 24"+ monitors and this drive to consume the whole screen makes the pages actually harder to read on desktops. Since, your field is IT related we can assume at least half of your users will be on desktops?
Overall, I think the site is good, I would move some things around like the huge map on https://purplegriffon.com/event/2028/itil-foundation and make it more of click to interact element. Bringing up the "Register for this Course" from the bottom of the page. I like the call to action buttons being consistent and very easy to find. Color scheme is nice and not at all off putting.
Well not for nothing but I hope it helps,
Don
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
-
New Website SEO Implications
Hi Moz Community, A client of mine has launched a new website. The new website is well designed, mobile friendly, fast loading and offers a far better UX than the old site. It has similar content but 'less wordy'. The old website was tired, slow, not mobile responsive etc but still ranked well. The domain has marketing leading authority and link metrics. Since the launch, the rankings for virtually every word has plummeted. Even previously ranked #1 words have disappeared to page 3 or 4. New pages have different URLs (301s from the old urls are working fine) and still score the same 98% (using the Moz page optimiser tool). Is it usual to experience some short term pain, or are these rankings drop an indication that something else is missing? My theory is that the new URLs are being treated like new pages, and that those new pages don't have the engagement data which is used for ranking. Thus, despite having the same authority of the old pages, as far as user data is concerned, they are new pages and therefor, not ranking well - yet. That theory would make logical sense but I'm hoping some experts here can help. Any suggestions welcome. Here's a quick checklist of things I have already done: complete 301 redirect list
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | I.AM.Strategist
New sitemap
Submitted to console
Created internal links from within their large blog
Optimised all the new pages (img alts, H1s etc) Extra info: Platform changed from Wordpress to Expression engine
Target pages now on level 3 not level 2 (extra subfolder used)
Less words used (average word count per page from 400+ to 250) Thanks in advance 🙂0 -
Can I define that one area of my website is a regualr news (no subscription) and the other part of the website is news that only subscribers can read?
Hi I have a client that have a news website, he asked me if he can define one area of his website to be a regular news that google can show on google news search results (no subscription) and the other part of the website is news that only subscribers can read? Thanks Roy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kadut1 -
Training events - optimisation and avoiding cannibalisation
This is quite a broad question I’m afraid – any help would be appreciated. I’m trying to find the best way of optimising our new training pages. These events are aimed at teaching our customers how to use our software to do different tasks. Inevitably, the themes and naming of these training workshops overlap with some of our products. A close example would be, to make up a product, ‘Keyword Ranker’ and ‘Keyword Ranker Training’. Someone has raised the concern that the training pages might start outranking the pages for our main tool, particularly as the training will be heavily promoted via social media. Also, the on-page content talks about similar topics. They’ve suggested that we use rel=canonical tags pointing from the each training page to the related product page to prevent this from happening. I myself don’t think this is a good idea as this is not what the rel=canonical tags are designed for. I think that they might prevent the events pages ranking for any query at all, which is not what we want. Also, I believe that the training pages and the products are different enough that Google will work out which to rank for relevant queries. Has anyone else had an experience of doing this? Are there any approaches that people would recommend? Or is this something that we shouldn’t be worried about? A few other thoughts that I’ve had: Using schema.org event markup to emphasise what the events pages are about. Making sure to remove old events once they have expired. I thought it best to let these 404 as I’ve read that 301s to a category page than cause Google to penalise content. Putting internal links from the product pages to the relevant training workshop pages. Using the meta unavailable tag on events pages, so that when the event has happened then it will be removed from Google’s index.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RG_SEO0 -
Page 1 Reached, Further Page Improvements and What Next ?
Moz, I have a particularly tricky competitive keyword that i have finally climbed our website to the 10th position of page 1, i am particularly pleased about this as all of the website and content is German which i have little understanding of and i have little support on this, I am pleased with the content and layout of the page and i am monitoring all Google Analytics values very closely, as well as the SERP positions, So as far as further progression with this page and hopefully climbing further up page 1, where do you think i should focus my efforts ? Page Speed optimization?, Building links to this page ?, blogging on this topic (with links) , Mobile responsive design (More difficult), further improvements to pages and content linked from this page ? Further improvements to the website in general?,further effort on tracking visitors and user experience monitoring (Like setting up Crazyegg or something?) Any other ideas would be greatly appreciated, Thanks all, James
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Antony_Towle0 -
Different domains for multilingual website
Hey guys, A site that I'm currently working on as different domains for each website language. So for example: word1word2.com for the english version word3word4.com for the french version word5word6.com for spanish version .... Is it better to move all of the different languages to the same domain and use subfolders for each language /fr/... Please note that the domains being used bring in organic traffic as well as they are EMDs. Thank You.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BruLee0 -
Multiple language websites help in pagerank?
My website is in portuguese. If I make a english version and include it at google.com, it will increase my overall page rank?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Naghirniac0 -
Redirecting Canonical 301s and Magento Website
I have an issue with a client's website where it has 3700+ pages, but roughly half of them are duplicates. Thankfully, the only difference between the original and the duplictes is the "?print" at the end of each URL (I suppose this is Magento's way of making a printable page version of the same page. I don't know, I didn't build it.) My questions is, how can I get all the pages like this http://www.mycompany.com/blah.html?print to redirect to pages like this... http://www.mycompany.com/blah.html Also, do they NEED to be Canonical, or will a 301 redirect be sufficient. Also, after having done this, if anybody knows, is there a way I can turn that feature off in Magento, because we're expanding our product line, and I don't want to have to keep chasing after these "?print" pages after the fact.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ClifThompson0 -
Domains for regional websites
Please take a look at 7city.com This landing page contains links to: www.7city.co.uk www.7city.ae www.7city.com.sg and our US website which is also www.7city.com It is programmed so: If you are a first time user and type www.7city.com you go to the landing page above. If you then click on AMERICAS, it sets a cookie and directs you to http://www.7city.com/home . When you revisit www.7city.com in the future as the cookie is set you will be automatically sent to the AMERICAS website i.e http://www.7city.com/home. Our US websites is nor performing well on organic ranking compared to other regional website. Is the above technique hindering our organic ranking in the US. Also, I have been led to believe that you get a higher ranking if the domain is specific to a country. Is this true? Does 7city.com receive higher ranking than if I created it as 7city.us for example? Many Thanks Mark
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | markc-1971830