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Please critique my site


cleary1981

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Need some constructive critism on my site www.tes-ni.com

 

I am trying to keep it simple and clean. Also have been trying to add flash to site but it takes a long time to load so I think it better without it.

 

If anyone has any seo tips I would appreciate them. I know I havn't put much effort into meta tags and page titles yet. Will do that later.

 

Thanks

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My thoughts:

 

I do like the look.. very clean indeed (hopefully like your water ;) ). Paragraphs are nice, short and to the point. I like that.

 

- You site doesn't validate.

- On the About Us page, I don;t understand why the first two paragraphs are of different size and colour from the rest of the site. If you want it to stand out, perhaps putting those paragraphs into a soft rounded corner panel, all the while retaining the consistency of the text look site wide.

- When making all your images separate, this will cause more HTTP requests.. I would recommend merging related images into one via css sprite sheets to economize on this (reduce those requests and file sizes). So images like:

http://www.tes-ni.com/images/link_graphic_waste2.jpg

http://www.tes-ni.com/images/link_graphic_water2.jpg and

http://www.tes-ni.com/images/link_graphic_power2.jpg could be a prime example.

You can have a look at Yahoo's best practices for more details on speeding sites up (not that yours is slow / heavy or anything).

 

- To further expand on optimizations, you can use a tool like Yahoo's smushit! to reduce image file sizes. You home page can shave off ~3.18 KB as an example.

- Once you do focus on SEO, I would add heading tags, as well as ditch the meta 'keyword' tag and refine the 'description' tag, which should be a short concise natural readable sentence that isn't a dumping ground for keywords.

- Tables should not be used for layout purposes, but rather for tabular data. I would learn css layout techniques instead (and use external css files instead of embedding them).

 

Overall though.. the site is still lightweight, clean and presentable. Well done IMO.

 

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<a class="link_top" href="water.htm">Water Treatment</a> | <a class="link_top" href="waste.htm">Wastewater Treatment</a> | <a class="link_top" href="power.htm">Power Control Automation</a> | <a class="link_top" href="portfolio.htm">Portfolio</a> | <a class="link_top" href="news.htm">News</a> | <a class="link_top" href="downloads.htm">Downloads</a>

That's a list, <ul><li>, and here's an example on how to make them center/show up next to eachother..

 

http://www.tes-ni.com/contact.htm  <address> is a nice tag to use for addresses.

http://www.tes-ni.com/sitemap.htm Drop the caps, it's SCREAMING.

http://www.tes-ni.com/portfolio_power.htm the image heading is lacking alt text, add it and then add a <h1> around it (in line with nrg_alpha's earlier headers comment, and I'll second his "Tables should not be used for layout") Why is this an image anyway? Font doesn't strike as being -that- fancy. Normal text would do fine?

 

http://www.tes-ni.com/news.htm Personally I'd float the read more links to the right for a more consistent look/faster locating of the link.

http://www.tes-ni.com/images/tnail2_power.gif that one is used without alt text as well btw. Could be missing in other places as well, didn't check all that thoroughly.

 

 

 

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Yeah, I don't agree about his "does not validate", heck this page doesn't validate nor does Google.

 

How does that justify not validating your page and why would Google need to validate?

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Yeah, I don't agree about his "does not validate", heck this page doesn't validate nor does Google.

 

That's not the point. As far as I'm concerned, why not try to build something valid to begin with? Even if a page renders fine in a specific browser today.. who's to say it will when the next version comes out (odds are, it'll probably still render fine.. but who knows)? Sure there are tons of sites / pages that don't validate and work perfectly. I just personally don't see it as a bad thing in trying to get something to validate from the get go. But that's just me.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I have changed the code of the homepage to tableless design and made a few of the other changes that were suggested. What are you thoughts now? http://www.tes-ni.com

 

Tableless is much better in this case.  The overall site looks better.

 

Some quickies:

- Your site still doesn't validate.  Not sure if it did before or you care, I guess it did since you have the icon.

- The, "Power Control Automation" text bleeds through the button. (FF/Ubuntu).

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a few quick things, mostly about the contact page:

 

1. that header graphic is way too canned IMO.

2. i'm surprised there's no corporate info or careers page - obviously this is the client's decision, but for a water treatment company, i would have expected that sort of info.

3. the description bubble on the inline google map completely obscures the map itself - perhaps make the embedded map larger.

 

otherwise nice clean site. changing the font to black might make it easier to read, as it feels a bit fluffy right now.

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I agree with Maq.

 

So good stuff on the tableless design. And only 4 errors left. (which is easy to fix.. as <meta name="verify-v1" content="zLzakTZ44XvhIqX+F6y2e8duWDamev0WMDW2k5QKe/E=" >  should be <meta name="verify-v1" content="zLzakTZ44XvhIqX+F6y2e8duWDamev0WMDW2k5QKe/E=" /> ).

 

I see you've added some SEO too... only comment is with regards to the description tag.. it should not be a place to stuff keywords. A description tag should be a short, concise sentence in a natural readable sense that gives the visitors a heads up about the site/page and what that page is about. Don't forget that this description is what shows up in search engines (treat it as a quick heads up as opposed to stuffing with key words). So in your case, an example description could look like:

 

<meta name="description" content="TES are specialists in power, control and automation systems involving the design and construction of state of the art wastewater treatment facilities."/>

 

(or something along those lines). So you can use some key words within that (which is fine), but strive to make it more natural.

 

Good stuff though. :)  It's definitely an improvement!

 

Edit (Daniel0): Changed bbcode (it broke layout).

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Ok Points noted. My homepage does validate now. Must remeber to check after making changes. I am working on a careers section as I agree this is important. As for the SEO I haven't put too much time into it yet. I will sped more time on this.

 

Does anyone think changing the while site to tableless design would be of benefit?

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akitchin, what do you mean when you say way too canned? I don't understand. I agree about the map. I am working on a better solution. The road we are on isn't even on google maps. lol

 

what i mean is it's too much like a stock photo, but that's probably just personal bias.

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Edit (Daniel0): Changed bbcode (it broke layout).

 

Sorry dude.. I'm guessing it had something to do with [tt] (or lack thereof)? I originally a cut and paste a line from viewing source that I then modified (so I didn't add any tt tags or anything). I'll be more careful about stuff like.

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If I used [pre], I wasn't even aware of it. I just cut and pasted into the post, saw how it looked and though it was strange showing up the way it did. I figured the posting system automatically handled the bbcode part to accommodate that line of code. I'm wrong again *sigh*. But yeah, I'll know better next time ;)

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