BCAV_WEB Posted November 23, 2010 Share Posted November 23, 2010 Hi, If anyone has any free time, could you please go to this site; www.bikescarsandvans.co.uk and give us a bit of feedback and/or input on how we can make the site better. At the moment we're developing a better search function for vehicles, which can be seen on www.bikescarsandvans.co.uk/test.php Any comments will be much appericated. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JonnoTheDev Posted November 23, 2010 Share Posted November 23, 2010 If anyone has any free time, could you please go to this site; www.bikescarsandvans.co.uk and give us a bit of feedback and/or input on how we can make the site better. You need content. Your homepage simply contains links to 3rd party websites. I click on a Honda & I am simply taken to Honda's website. A user would be on your site for all of 3 seconds. These links should go to pages on your own site with content about the vehicle. That detail page could have a link to the manufacturers website. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BCAV_WEB Posted November 23, 2010 Author Share Posted November 23, 2010 haha thank you, for backing up my cause!! Orginally they took a user to our offer, but my boss said "No take the user to the main dealer, so they can look up more info on the vehicle before, buying from us" Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JonnoTheDev Posted November 23, 2010 Share Posted November 23, 2010 You need the content in order to get your pages indexed on search engines. How will you get any traffic if you do not have pages containing content describing what you are offering to the customer? What are your main keyphrases that you want people to find your website under? Users will not land on your homepage from a search engine, you cannot target all searchphrases on one single page. If a user was to search on Google for 'Buying a Honda Civic', you will want your Honda page to appear in the search results. This is where you must use targeted content. Also a search engine cannot fill in your search box on your website. You need to make these pages accessible to a search engine from a sitemap. http://www.bikescarsandvans.co.uk/about_us.php You should not use images to display text. The step1,2 etc content should be text. The cogs can still be graphics and positioned with CSS. Remember, text content is king. Content within images is useless! http://www.bikescarsandvans.co.uk/details.php This page should be split up. There are far too many results to display and the load time is horrendous. Also some of the images are skewed. You should resize to the correct aspect ratio. Your additional features CSS is poor. It does not work. I would place this on a detail page for the actual vehicle. Again the images are poor and when clicked they just return the user to the top of the page. This site could be massively improved. I think it is more of the navigation and the actual page content that needs work. The design is not that bad. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BCAV_WEB Posted November 23, 2010 Author Share Posted November 23, 2010 Okay, fair points thank you I will try my best to sort out the cog image, my boss did want to keep the same font as used on the image. This wouldn't be possible because it isn't a standard font, meaning a user would have to download it to see it, correct? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JonnoTheDev Posted November 23, 2010 Share Posted November 23, 2010 The problem is that the image is 500k. That is far too large. Also it looks terrible. I would use a standard web safe font, arial, verdana, helvetica, etc. What you have to say to your boss is: Does he want the website to be found on Google? If not then do what you like. If you complete this as it is currently is you will find that after a few months you will have little or no traffic from any search engines. Another thing is that your page titles are the same on every page. Google will immediately penalise you for this. From what I have seen you are not familiar with basic SEO. If this is not an issue with your site, no worries. However seeing that it is a business, then search engine results are key for traffic and conversions to sales. This site fails on all levels of SEO. I suggest you download http://www.seobook.com/ and read on site architecture. I'm not having a go or being personal, I just know that somewhere down the line after you have made this website your boss will turn round and say why have we not had any sales from our website. So, really it's just a warning. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BCAV_WEB Posted November 23, 2010 Author Share Posted November 23, 2010 Thank you for the advice! I knew SEO was something that needed improving on, i'm just finding it hard to get everything done in a normal wprking day. What with the boss wanting new cars added, prices altered weekly / monthly, just get bogged down. Also with PHP, MySQL and Google if content is coming from a database how would this affect google finding etc...?? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JonnoTheDev Posted November 23, 2010 Share Posted November 23, 2010 Also with PHP, MySQL and Google if content is coming from a database how would this affect google finding etc It doesn't. Most websites are database driven. As long as your pages are accessible via internal links, not all behind forms, etc, there are no issues. Make sure your urls are friendly i.e bad: /foobar.php?p=cars&x=1&y=2&z=3 good: /foobar/cars/1/2/3 If you are constantly having to make changes to the content it would be a good idea to make those sections content managed such as adding / editing vehicles, changing prices, adding manufacturers categories, modifying page content, etc. Then modifications to content can be made by anyone who has access to the CMS, and you just stick to developing the website as opposed to menial tasks such as changing content. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BCAV_WEB Posted November 23, 2010 Author Share Posted November 23, 2010 Well the cars will be accessible not only from the form, but a link on the top of the page, so no issues there. I've been trying to get a CMS system up and running, but getting bogged down with their requests as its alter the data and they want it done ASAP! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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