Does My Site Hit the Button?

[semlabs]

Hi,

 

I put my site online about 3 months ago. I would like people to take a look at my site as if they were going to it looking for the services I offer and tell me what is good and or bar about it in their opinion.

 

I am looking for answers to questions like:

Does the text engage ? Do you even want to read it?

Is there information you think should be there but isn't?

Is there anything that puts you off?

 

My site is: http://semlabs.co.uk/ and my services are SEO related.

 

I would like to point out that I don't want to turn the site into a giant flashing commercial bill board. I am rather trying to make it a distinguished site. I don't want to be working with people who are falling for sales pitches. I am more interested in working with people who are looking for someone with my ideals and approach to work.

 

Thanks in advance for any input.

[nrg_alpha]

Overall, not bad IMO. I do think that the size dragging feature is redundant due to browsers being able to do just that (usually with ctrl + plus / minus).

 

Technicalities:

Using Firefox's Yslow, I examined your home page: Some stats jump out:

- Your page uses 70 HTTP Requests.. this is a lot.. I would consider shrinking the number to requests to the server by reducing the amount of stuff the page needs to call..

- Your javascripts (all 3 of them) total 122,2k. Kind of heavy IMO.. I would consider merging some where possible, minifying them and possibly gzipping them to reduce this.

- On the note of gzipping, I would look into also possibly gzipping your .php and .css files.

- You make use of 63 css images.. that's pretty heavy. I would consider bringing this number down somehow.

- Since smushit now comes bundled with yslow, I would check and see what images can be optimized (homepage reads out a potential saving of 6.26 KB).

- You can benefit from merging some graphics into css sprite sheets.. Yahoo's Best practices explains a multitude of ways to improve site performance.

- You have multiple h1 tags.. you should only have one per page..

 

As far as the copy is concerned, one thing I once read was that usually copy contains many unnecessary words.. The suggestion was to see if you can trim down your text by half. While some pages have more text than others, I would consider this advice. As an example, consider your home page text (I struck out text that in my opinion are not terribly important - it is admittedly subjective):

 

EM Labs is a small SEO agency based on the border between Wales and the West Midlands that specialises in link building and organic rankings in search engines (non-paid search results). You won't find any pushy sales literature here, but instead information that will help you decide on a course of action that best suits you. All methods and processes are fully explained, so you know exactly what you are getting. If you are new to SEO it is a good idea to find out what it is and what is involved so you can make an educated decision when hiring a search engine marketing company. You can find out about the basics of SEO here. If you already know a bit about SEO, you can find out what services are on offer on the SEO services page. Those who are involved in web development or SEO are probably looking for the SEM Labs

 

Point being, I would skip out on the words that don't get right down to business and write short but accurate and concise paragraphs instead of rambling about non-imparitive information (not trying to sound rude or disrespectful here). So the same principal applies to any body of text.. In the about page, I would skimp out on the fact that you left your former company and that rank checker is no longer available. I would encourage a complete rewrite. Remember, people's attention span is short.. make your body of text short and to the point. The longer it is the better the odds people will turn away and not even bother reading it (don't worry.. you're not alone in this.. I too fall vicitim of this.. but I try to keep this in mind from here on out when I write stuff).

 

In fact, I am reminded of this recent article from sitepoint. A good read that gets where I'm trying to get at.

[Axeia]

Well, you made me turn off javascript.. which I don't remember doing for any site except those with alert() spam.

The size thingy.. seriously annoying as it needs to load the page before it can execute causing this "shock" behaviour.

 

The menu background slider.. makes me cry out in agony, so annoying, and the background on the last page (contact) isn't aligned properly. (an ul/li would be better than div/div to)

 

Consider the whole SEO story I think your urls could do with some more keywords

http://semlabs.co.uk/contact is lacking the for attribute on the labels

 

Overal it's quite good, and a nice change from most sites posted here as I see fieldsets, paragraphs and so on.

Your javascripts however.. lose them.

[semlabs]

Thanks for the comprehensive replies. All info taken on board for mark 2.

[twebman84]

First, what I like about it, which is quite a bit:

 

- buttons and icons are very fresh and nicely done

- clearly state your services near the top of the site

- color choice is excellent, very warm and welcoming

 

A few small points of critique:

 

- wasn't immediately apparent to me that "SEM Labs" was a link back to home. Maybe try "Home" and/or also make the masthead a link to your Home page

- Home page is probably too long.  I'd trim some of the articles at the bottom

- Services page is very strong with the graphics and arrows.  May consider using this as the home page

- Very first paragraph on home page is too long. I'd at least chunk it up so readers can scan it easier

 

Very nice job and good luck!

[semlabs]

Thanks for your input "twebman84". Someone else has made the same comment about the services page. I think its a very good point. People don't like to read text, they like to see nice pictures with text on them, bold headings etc.

[PcGeniusProductions]

I've always been a fan of this kind of layout, nice and clean, well presented. I did not go too far into detail, as I'm not expert on this kind of stuff, but there's one thing you may wish to fix... In firefox (not sure about anything else) your navigation menu on the right overlaps one of the two buttons underneeth it.

Other than that, I think it looks OK.

 

PS: But i'm no expert.

[semlabs]

Thanks for the heads up. Are you on Windows, Linux without MSCoreFonts or Mac?