First Time Website

cullen5998

I just finished my dissertation a few weeks ago,it was on online marketing.
Im starting a job a a few days and have to build a website so I put together one to practice and put it online.
Not going to make much if any money from it but just want some opinions really on how it could be improved.

One page that is not finished is the about us page by the way. I will put it up later.

http://www.online-marketing-methods.info/

TheWaterboy

First thing that jumps out at me is the black background and white text..Reading it for 10 seconds hurts my eyes. No matter how good the information is, if the user cannot read it then it is of no benefit!

cullen5998

I see what you mean, would gray on a black background be better?
It looks fine to me on my screen as its not as bright as the white.

lion_bar

My advice to you would be to take that website off line.

Your might have done a dissertation on Online Marketing but you must have missed any classes on web page design, usability etc.

There are pages where the background colour hides the text, was that by design? Grey background and grey text doesn't work for most people.
http://www.online-marketing-methods.info/Social%20media%20marketing.html


I don't want to be too harsh but you need to do some very simple things to that site before you use it to promote your work. It reflects you.

You say you design websites on your services page

http://www.online-marketing-methods.info/Services.html well my advice is apply some of the tools and techniques you use when doing this to your own website first, then come back here for advice.

I'm annoyed just looking at it.

mikemac

Colour scheme is harsh to look at, black and white

But then you go the opposite way
Your links are difficult to read and don't stand out
http://www.online-marketing-methods.info/Services.html

tricky D

Hi Tom,

Firstly, you would better off posting this in the Website Reviews forum.

The colours should be based on black text on white. That's been the best for readability since printing was invented. The white on grey and other colour combinations on other pages are awful, some are illegible. Use contrast.

There is no brand identity including no logo.

You're using some bad practices:

• spaces in filenames
• centre aligned text
• tables for layout
• 2 heading 1's on most pages
• no meta description
• dunno what the iframes are about
• stats counter is a 90's thing
• using non breaking spaces for layout
• you need to proofread all your articles as there are many spelling, grammar, punctuation mistakes and other inconsistencies.
• the navigation links are all over the place
• your site doesn't even have its own form!
• some of your headings are linked to # huh??!
• email address is @gmail yet you have your own domain
• zero contact or similar info
• almost no trust rating

The content of the articles is a cause for concern. I'm guessing you're just coming out of college or a course and haven't actually worked much in real Internet marketing world. Much of the content appears to be well out of date. This is a classic indication of the disconnect between academia and the real world. A quick scan of some of the articles reveals some very unsatisfactory advice. Some highlights from a quick scan:

• Most of the articles understate the costs of all these marketing methods. The time, money and resources put into these efforts are not cheap at all. Net marketing is not some cheap magic wand.
• Purchasing links is now penalised by Google
• Article marketing is heading that way also to some extent as it has become so spammy
• The list building article doesn't mention permission, privacy, oversells response rate (5% would be unrealistically high), and sending 2000 mails is unlikely to be free if done properly due to tarpitting and list management costs.

I could go on, but all the articles have me shaking my head at so many pieces of bad advice and practices. As for offering consultancy and design, STOP! You risk doing serious damage to someone's business. I would agree with lion bar, take your site down now, not just for design and usability, but advice that damages others' net presence is going to kill your credibility. You need to get some real world experience under your belt and that'll take more than months. You also need to find and watch the current trends in net marketing and throw away the out-of-date books. You have a lot of learning and a lot of unlearning to do. Make yourself a few sites of interest to you (local sports, your fav tv show etc) and practice techniques on them and learn from making mistakes on those sites. Do not go into your new job feet first.

Sorry for being harsh, just being honest based on well over a decade in the game.

good luck

cullen5998

Cheers for all the advice guys. Advice is always good. I had the wrong CSS uploaded so thats why all the pages were with more messed up than they would otherwise be. Black and white is not ideal either so i changed it gray.
Changed some of the other pages too. Its an ongoing project and it was built in less than half a day so its not going to be perfect.
Some of the information may be a bit dated but its good if you know nothing or very little about the topic.
I will be adding a marketing news page that is updated with RSS feeds later hopefully instead of an about us page.
Thanks all for looking anyway its a bit better now anyway.
www.online-marketing-methods.info

Kinetic^

You've got more space on the front looking for money with the donation button and the affiliation links then you do with actual content.

Overflow

<!--
Design by Free CSS Templates
http://www.freecsstemplates.org
Released for free under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License

Name : Gestured
Description: A three-column, fixed-width blog design.
Version : 1.0
Released : 20091004

-->


Emmm come on, you designed it yourself !

I would lose the page counter, they were popular about a decade ago.

mneylon

cullen5998 wrote: »

Some of the information may be a bit dated but its good if you know nothing or very little about the topic.

No it's not. Most of the content on there is badly written, misleading or simply incorrect.

You have an entire page advocating buying links which is explicitly forbidden by Google.

You should also go through ALL the content and fix spelling and punctuation. Get someone to cleanup the style. For example:

"Blogging has many benefits that are useful to businesses and because of this it is a popular method of online marketing today."

And this doesn't make any sense:

"One of the benefits of blog marketing is that it is measurable and countable. By posting a blog it is easy to measure how many times the blog has been read and subscribed to which is very useful to a business."


As for the technical elements, they've been covered by other posters, but just to reiterate..

Spaces in filenames is a bad idea

Lose the counter

Also, why are you mentioning websites without actually linking to them?

lion_bar

Hi,

What course did you do the dissertation as part of?

Please PM if you prefer not to announce it here.

Thanks

Chet Zar

Please, please, please, please change your domain name to something else that doesn't even hint at underscores or .info...

Did I say please? Pleeeease!!

Get Cracking

I like the black and white,nice job:)