Improve my website!

Seal · Post by **Seal** » Sat May 31, 2008 4:45 am

Hello all,

It's been a while since I was last here, thats because I've been very busy working on setting up a new little company of mine! If any of you are familiar with all of america's one day one deal websites like woot.com then this shouldnt be a new concept to you. I've basically set it up here in england as we've never had anything like that here

.

Anyway I'm after lots of feedback and constructive criticism about how to improve my site. Check it out at http://www.flamingstock.com/

At the minute I'm focusing on a deal a week and gradually working towards one deal a day every day.

If anybody knows much about SEO or marketing then let me know as those are areas that I really need help with at the minute.

Thanks all
Seal

Matija · Post by **Matija** » Sat May 31, 2008 5:00 am

void(0) will get you absolutely nowhere.

angelkiller · Post by **angelkiller** » Sat May 31, 2008 5:29 am

Strictly as a consumer (I know nothing about making websites, etc) I liked your website. It was clean and simple. I liked how you can change pages without loading the whole page. (I think this is the void(0) Matija was talking about) The color scheme blends very nicely also. My only gripe would be about the "Previous Deals" page. Resizing a larger image to a smaller space distorts the image. I'd use a smaller image instead of resizing it.

Hope this helps and Good Luck!

ayemooth · Post by **ayemooth** » Sat May 31, 2008 6:28 am

Matija's right - unless you only ever want the homepage to be indexed by search engines, you need individual URLs for each page. Not having to load the whole code for each page is all well and good, but I like to use the back button! Also, your technique doesn't work when javascript is disabled.

angelkiller's right about the images - it also means you're serving larger images than necessary, slowing down page load and costing you more on hosting if they charge by traffic usage (and wasting metered visitors' allocation form their ISP).

Also, valid markup is always a good idea - see the W3C HTML validator to get pointers to what you should fix.

That's the web developer advice out of the way, now for my views as a user:

I expected that the "Previous Deals" page would include links to the details of the products in it. Putting the professional hat back on for a moment, that'd also be more content which is good for SEO.

Layout is nice and clean, although I thought the Home/Previous deals/About us/Contact us menu was a little lost - perhaps a suitably-coloured bar behind it would help. I'm no designer though, so take my idea with a big pinch of salt!

I'd recommend taking the email addresses off the Contact page - spam is anough of a nuisance without telling them your addresses! Put a form there, with the option for the user to select who they want to contact.

jon

Seal · Post by **Seal** » Mon Jun 02, 2008 3:04 pm

The initial feedback I have had is that the site is a little too clean! I might try add a splash of colour soon.

I've also been reading some web marketing forums. As a techie I've always been quite keen on the very clean pre-loaders and ajax loads (where there is no page refresh but lots of voids() although never realized what a huge NO NO this is in terms of seo!

Does anyone know anything about hiding page urls? Like I've noticed that some websites have http://sitename.com/category/page/product/100001 /and I know its a dynamic page but the url either does not have an extension or it is always .html. How is this done? Also is this something thats done for SEO's sake?

Matija · Post by **Matija** » Mon Jun 02, 2008 9:01 pm

It's called "URL rewriting" and yeah, it's done for both SEO and user convenience.

In your example you would rather want to have "100001/product-name" or "100001-product-name" or "product-name-1000001".