Sort of new site - Commercial and Residential Cleaning

[Plagel]

http://www.sparkleaning.com/

 

initial reactions, advice, etc? Thanks for any feedback.

 

We know the image(s) suck, too. Tips appreciated

 

We tried not to be as basic as like Mary Jane's Cleaning Service, we do floors and dust call us 25 years experience. However we also didn't want to be/couldn't be like maidbrigade.com or something.

 

Cheers

[WarKirby]

MY opinions, which are by no means  law or fact:

 

 

I think you should put the contact form only on the Contact page. Also left-align the input labels, make the Comment textarea significantly larger (especially in width), and add a little more space between all the input boxes in the form

 

Also, not really about the website, but your offering Educational services seems a bit odd for a janitorial company. What does that involve ?

[sKunKbad]

I think your images and lack of images don't really reflect a cleaning service. You ought to have some images of a person mopping the floor, cleaning windows, wiping counter tops, making a bed, dusting some furniture, and stuff like that. Have some maid in a uniform with a big smile like she'd clean your toilet with her toothbrush if she had to make you happy. Hire somebody that looks nice to do this if your maids aren't model quality.

 

The contact form isn't big enough, and the orange background of the form is not very nice looking to me. Just a white background and the standard form button would be fine.

 

Make the phone number big, and possibly part of the logo of each page. Also, don't be afraid to put a basic list of prices, or maybe a special offer that grabs attention. "$50 for your first cleaning!", "50% off your first month" or something that will make a person grab the phone and call you. A lot of people don't read anything on a website. They look at the home page and decide if they are going to call you within about 3 seconds. It's like catching a fish. If you use the right lure, you'll get a reaction bite.

 

Put a list of your services on the home page. You need content to get indexed by Google the way you want. Think about what a person would search for if they were searching for a maid on Google. They'd probably search for "maid service bristol" or something like that. The word "Maid", and the city name "Bristol" don't appear anywhere on the home page. You won't get ranked in a search like that unless you include those words. So, with that in mind, you should probably have a list of cities on the home page, and call it your "service area".

 

The actual content of your template is placed very low in the code. Use absolute positioning to change the order of the code, but keep the page looking the way it is now. Include javascript from external files instead of having it in the head section of the page. The closer your content gets to the top of the code the better.

 

I could probably go into more detail, but I think if you implement some of these things, you will do much better.

[thewooleymammoth]

I could be wrong, and this might not be a big deal to you, but im pretty sure its against googles TOS to printscreen and use thier maps.

 

Like the site though.

[Plagel]

Thanks it's a work in progress. Have a lot more small things planned that should sharpen everything up.

 

The map is actually using their API, not a screen shot...the actual address is a LITTLE down the road since it's not perfect, lol

[thewooleymammoth]

oh very cool, your set then, good luck i like the site.

[ignace]

- HTML & CSS are invalid

 

- The website provide services to specific area's use geo-targeted keywords (your client will thank you) + Make sure to highlight keywords on all pages.

 

- To increase SEO I would replace:

 

<!-- XHTML specifies alt as a required attribute (http://htmldog.com/reference/htmltags/img/) -->
<img width="750px" height="71px" src="http://www.sparkleaning.com/images/headbg2.png"/>

 

With

 

<h1><span>Sparkleaning</span></h1>

 

h1 span { margin: -9999px; }
h1 { background-image: url(http://www.sparkleaning.com/images/headbg2.png); background-repeat: none; width: 750px; height: 71px; }

 

- Optimize your webpage titles to increase findability. They now look the same for each page. For the homepage I would recommend something like:

 

Sparkleaning - Cleaning service in Bucks County, Philadelphia and New Jersey

 

- I think it's ok for the contact form to be on every page easy for people to contact your client (especially because it's a small website). It's not a de facto but it doesn't bother me altough I would add a title to it indicating that it's a contact form.

 

- One of your contact form items is mislabeled

 

<label for="name">Name</label>
<input type="text" name="first_name" ..>