Website criticism's welcomed please - www.dovedelight.co.uk

[wmrcomputers]

Hi guys. I know a few of you will have seen the website in the past. It's only done using a web based free WYSIWYG editor, but I'm hoping it's doing the job.

If anyone can spare five mins to check it out, make sure everything works right, look out for bad english and spelling errors etc I would be most grateful.

Constructive criticism welcomed

Website is at www.dovedelight.co.uk

Thanks

 

[Withnail]

The only thing i could see was unnecessary apostrophes in "issues" T's & C's.

 

[gdavies]

dude not a bad service at all pretty slick animation would grab the attention a little more i guess and more of clearer pics would help too, to make it more professional perhaps the links at the bottom were gone lol.

 

[Ecker]

Just a few HCI and "Flow" niggles. Suggest:

o proportionally enlarging your images so that they are the same width as your headline text where possible.
o making your lines of text considerably shorter, the eye is not accustomed to lines that long and gets tired.

And: "By placing a booking with us is your acceptance of these terms." on your Ts and Cs page does not read
very well, suggest: "Your placing a booking with us is your acceptance of these terms."

I'd be a wee bit careful on the animation front if you are considering that. I suspect an animated dove might
prove to be slightly hypnotic and detract from your message. I'd like to be proved wrong on this if anyone
has done anything similar.

Hope that's been a bit helpful.

 

[wmrcomputers]

Firstly, thanks everyone for feedback!

@Withnail - Cheers - christ knows where I got all of those apostrophes from!!

@gdavies - animation to be considered for future, clearer pics should hopefully be on the way after our first release in a months time, and the free link removal would cost me a few quid a month so I'm waiting until I make the money first

@Ecker - Image size issues mainly down to using a few royalty free images to get the website underway - again this should improve once we have 100% our own images to use. Long text scenario I've already thought about, I'm just struggling to re-word things any better at the moment. The acceptance of terms line has been changed to your suggestion which certainly does read better. Thanks. Finally your thoughts on animation have been noted, and this was also one of my slight concerns... also some people won't necessarily have the right plugins installed and therefore they don't see the website displayed correctly and it starts to look messy.

Good points all around thanks guys

 

[wmrcomputers]

Also if anybody has ever considered trying google adwords to promote their website GO FOR IT! I've had it running for just over a week and I'm already receiving 10 - 20 hits daily, and have received 3 confirmed bookings because of it (it has only cost me £3.80 in click throughs so far)
Worth every penny!!

 

[MyCult]

Very cool I'm glad this is taking off for you

If your AdWords account is fairly new you can get vouchers that give you free AdWords credit. They range from about £25 up to £75 for new account holders. I'd offer to give you one mate but I gave my last one to Cookie Monster. Have a search you may be able to find one. If I can track down another one of those £75 free adwords codes it's yours mate

Have a look into Dynamic Keyword Insertion; it is one of a few techniques that increase your click through rate by making your adverts more tagetted.

You'd get regular organic traffic too WMR if you stopped using masked domain forwarding. Whenever you hit dovedelight.co.uk the address in the address bar is masked (it never changes no matter where on the site you navigate to).

This means when a search engine spider comes past there is no way to associate a given pages' content with it's specific URL. All pages and all content appear to be under the same URL.

This gets the spiders in a muddle and stops your site making it into Googles (and other search engines) indexes.

dovedelight.co.uk does appear in Yahoo
dovedelight.co.uk doesn't appear in Googles index
dovedelight.co.uk doesn't appear in Bings index

Meaning you will get no organic traffic from a search engine unless you are in their index.

I know you're in Google local business centre which is good when someone looks for Dove Delight Stafford or Dove Releases Stafford they get your maps listing and a link to your site. It might be good to add your business to both Bing and Yahoo's business listings too (both free)

Yahoo! Local Add Listing: http://listings.local.yahoo.com/

Bing Local Add Listing: http://dbupdate.infousa.com/dbupdate/startupdate?bas_request=A

You could also try FreeIndex (it is free not just a clever name) I've had leads via them in the past.

That's more than enough shit from this cu*t.

 

[wmrcomputers]

Brilliant advice regarding organic trafic, thanks. I know I can unmask it, but didn't ideally want visitors seeing the dovedelight.weebly.com address. Hmmm... another way?

Also, I did indeed receive a £75 adwords voucher in the post (nice people at google) so it cost me £10 for £85 worth of clicks... can't be bad!

 

[MyCult]

Looks like there is a way to get the weebly site to use your domain without the masking:

http://blog.weebly.com/2/post/2008/06/please-update-your-custom-domain-a-records.html

You'll have to have a look in your weebly back end mate see how much flexibility they give you.

 

[John Marwood]

Mr MyCult is a very generous chap with his knowledge

Re the site: One of the problems of doing something inexpensively is that you can appear to be not as professional and exciting as you would like to be. The front page is the page that will either keep you on the site or bounce you somewhere else and at the moment I dont think it has the wow factor.

Perhaps one large beautiful eyecatching photograph would do the trick

Just a thought - I dont have many these days

 

[Alan B'Stard]

A really attractive looking website WMR.

I'd agree with most of the other comments, lose the link at the bottom asap and the masking.

I'm not a great lover of flash animation and sometimes thinks it actually distracts from the site, also not all viewers will have the plugin installed or know how to install it, so I wouldn't recommend that.

I'd also run the pages through this service http://validator.w3.org/ to validate the html, coding errors can also prevent google indexing.

The basket and cages images, I think would look better if they all had the same green hedge background as in the pair and not showing a wooden fence or pushbike. The heart shaped basket looks the business but a top profile and front profile shot may show this off better.

The Our Doves page has too much text imho and spends half of it justifying why you have chosen the birds you have. I'd edit that to:

"Our doves are English White Straight Tail Garden Doves which have a strong homing instinct.

They are kept at our lofts in two different locations within Stafford.

The birds receive training throughout the year to ensure that they will always return straight home once released.

Fresh water & the best quality feed available is waiting as their reward as soon as they return home.

Our birds are very special to us and are excercised on a daily basis."

To personalise it, I'd mention if you have named any, do you have any favourites, do they show any personality?

The contact page only has a mobile number, I'd add an address as well.

 

[cookie_monster]

...Our birds are very special to us and are excercised on a daily basis."

exercised.

aside from that, i really dont know enough about the techy stuff to comment, but i like it.

nice and clean, easy to read, easy to navigate.




x

 

[wmrcomputers]

@cookie - exercised correctly spelt now (thanks)

@MyCult - found out the necessary changes to alter the DNS and my site should now be fully indexable by google - you're a star for pointing out that I could do it!! (if you can check and confirm I'd be grateful)

 

[MyCult]

Looks good to me mate! I'll have another look see when I get home too.

You should appear in Google.co.uk soon. In fact I'd put a little link to dovedelight.co.uk in your sig just to help G along

I see you have Analytics on there (good man) make sure you link your AdWords and Analytics accounts together (if you haven't already). This helps G better show you what is organic traffic and what is pay per click (AdWords).

I would also recommend setting up a custom profile on the Analytics account too. By default Google only shows the keyword trigger for the advert not the actual search terms themselves.

If you are using broad match keywords and phrase match keywords this can generate very misleading data. AdWords is basically designed to leach money out of you penny by penny. G doesn't care if your adverts generate you business, they just care that you are paying them.

I'll try and explain a little better. If I have car as a broad match or phrase match keyword the following searches will trigger my advert:

big car
red car
alan car
car insurance
free car
jimmy car

However in my Analytics profile it will show all those under car and not show me that I'm wasting my click on people looking for things I don't have. That isn't the best example but you see what I'm getting at.

You can modify Analytics to show you the exact search that triggered your advert, not just the broad or phrase match keyword that it is associated with. This gives you a very valuable insight to the exact searches people are using to get to your site and keeps you better equipped to streamline your AdWords.

Also mate don't forget them negative keywords, the Analytics mod I spoke about will give you some good pointer for that.

Sorry if your doing this already and I'm patronising but I funting love this stuff mate. MyFavorite subject.

 

[wmrcomputers]

appreciated it is too mate!

When you say about putting a link to dovedelight.co.uk in my sig to help G along, what sig are you reffering to?

 

[MyCult]

I would recommend your sig read:

Your mouse has moved. Windows XP must be restarted for the change to take effect. Reboot now? [ OK ]
Dove Releases Stafford by www.dovedelight.co.uk #1 for weddings & special occasions

I have absolute shit in MySig. It's not because I want you guys to look @ it. It's not because I think it's cool (I really don't). It's because Google uses link to discover new websites and to rate the ones it already knows about. The more links the better and every little helps.

 

[tek-monkey]

I guess your forums one, the more places SkyNet see links to your site the better they think it is.

 

[wmrcomputers]

ahhh, so you mean that because stafford forum is already indexed by Google, it would automatically help me if people click my link at the forum??
I'm liking this shizzle!!

 

[MyCult]

Pages on staffordforum.com the Google has spidered in the last 24hours

Pages on staffordforum.com the Google has spidered in the last week

Use the popularity of this site to get www.dovedelight.co.uk indexed more quickly

 

[wmrcomputers]

MyCult - you have been a tremendous help!