UKC

Hi,

Inspired to post after reading the SEO post...can anyone please look at my website for my business. It would be great if anyone could give some general comments on it (ie. layout, design etc) and anything you'd improve?

Thanks!

www.sigcleaning.co.uk

In reply to phja:

How about a customer feedback / comment section?

In reply to phja: That's a really profesional looking site! Did you build that yoursef?

In reply to phja:

Yeah, a customer feedback form is not a bad shout. Cheers

Cheers, phja built the site and I wrote the content Definitely took phja a while lol.

In reply to phja:

Looks good. You might want a £ sign on the prices!

In reply to phja:

Yeah we tried to do that but for some reason when the website was uploaded all that was displayed was a load of random characters like &,$? The only way to solve it was to avoid special characters, lol.

In reply to candy_girl:

GBP is accepted text, too.

In reply to candy_girl:

Instead of £ put £ in the HTML, it should display ok then.

In reply to phja:

That's a good job you've done there.

Minor typo:

"This means there is no monthly fees and no annual charges" should be "there are no monthly fees...". More pedants will be along shortly.

In reply to Beat me to it!:

Thanks very much...it seems to have worked

In reply to Turdus torquatus:

Cheers for the heads up on the typos...We will have to go through the website and get them changed

In reply to candy_girl:


No probs I've been playing with websites for 16 years now, so have come across these oddities before when writing forum software. For certain html special characters you have to encode them with their entity number or name for them to be displayed on the web page. Similar to your copyright symbol.

In reply to phja:

I notice you have Facebook and twitter icons. Ability to like or tweet your web pages with one click would be good. A feed of Facebook mentions / tweets could also be useful somewhere on the site.

In reply to phja: Anyone care to take a look at mine?

www.crewegraphics.co.uk

In reply to Beat me to it!:

Yeah we had a fb page and twitter account but we did not really do anything with them and did not know how much they did for SEO so we were going to get rid of them...bad move?

In reply to candy_girl:

Depends on how much traffic they generate, if you're not using Facebook or twitter probably best to remove from site.

Do you have a google webmaster account? Allows you to see how google sees your site, which searches your site is most commonly coming up in, and which generate the most click troughs to your site etc.

In reply to Robin76:

I like a styling, nice and "snazzy". Not sure if it would go against the minimalist layout of the page but your home page doesn't really give me any ideas as to what your business is about...maybe a little intro would be good?

I would change the styling on the about us page...make it a bit more edgy perhaps...something behind the text to make the text stand out more.

A lot of websites selling graphic products use flash the make the page dynamic...could be good for users...but a trade off against SEO.

Small points

-look carefully at the right side of your home page...the DIV's arn't the same width (edge not lined up).

-Telephone number is a different size and font on home and about us pages.

In reply to phja:

Oh and take a look at microdata. It's about the semantic web and helping search engines understand the content on your site and give it context.

Google, bing, yahoo all support http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microdata_(HTML)

So business name, address, telephone, purpose etc can all be tagged for the search engines to pick out and highlight.

In reply to Beat me to it!:

We will get rid of the facebook and twitter accounts.

We do have webmaster but there seems to have a wide range of searches that we are making impressions in (e.g. cleaning house, domestic cleaning companies).

When we set up the website we specifically targeted keywords such as "home cleaning derby" but no one seems to search for their place just "home cleaning" etc. Not sure how we would target this?

Thanks for your help

In reply to phja:

Search engines ignore the keywords meta tag. Try to separate the words in the description meta tag, so use & instead of and, and use | separator between major terms. Put the most likely search first first, to increase the importance. Google has PDF on all the things to optimise search. There should be a link in your webmaster account pages / help.

In reply to phja:

Get a business entry in google maps as well , which helps.

In reply to candy_girl:

Good stuff.

Content - Check.
Friendly URLs with Keywords - Check.

The HTML could do with a proper fix though.

Use a <NAV> tag round your navigation menu elements.

There is no such HTML as P1, P2, P3 neither is there UL2 etc.

Close your tags properly i.e. <BR/> and not <BR> , <LINK rel=""... />

In reply to candy_girl:

Never copy and paste from microsoft word documents for content. Word changes a lot of characters to non standard ones as well which wont render on a web page.

In reply to Beat me to it!:

Nice generally but...

20% off bubble bit too big.
banner of text on front page looks a bit odd, funny font.
some of the blue text is mixed up with the black text on the home page
some of the text needs a bit more space between the lines

In reply to phja:
Nice looking site to me! However did you mean to allow the contact form to be sent without any entries? You might want to make some entries mandatory like a name and a valid email address or at least a phone number?
What about putting some references on your about us page?