Website feedback

whitelightrider

Hi Folks,

Im hoping you could give me some feedback on my wifes site. Its for her Music School.

Its at www.athenrymusicschool.com

Any ideas or suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Neither of us are site designers and a friend set it up for us so hopefully we can make any changes you suggest!!

TonyStark

Looks good, from the homepage a few small points.

• Logo seems hard to read... I read it initially as "Athenty School of Music". Perhaps place the logo text above/below the violin graphic.
• Welcome should be called "About Us" possibly as sub content is really about the school and not really about a "Welcome". It could possibly be merged or even a new title called learning music. Just slightly tweak your information architecture.
• Homepage needs stronger call to actions. If the site's
• Menu needs to be reordered into most popular items for the user to the top and then the lesser relevant stuff to the bottom of the list.
• Call to actions need to be defined and possibly seperate from the menu or given their own button. For instance "Confirm your place" could be put into a button called "Book a lesson" making it a little more clear that thats what you do. Confirm almost suggests there is a booking there already.

Lastly put yourself in the shoes of the target audience, identify 3 main users of the site eg.Parents, Children, Tutors. Write out three common things that they would like to accomplish from the site. Try to acheive each of these things and think about how easy/hard it was to do it. If you find it difficult doing this...ask a person from each of the demographics to use the site and ask them what they would like to achieve.

Eg. A parent wants to book a class. How easy/hard was it for them to do it. What did they want? An email address/phone number/online booking facility.

Hope this helps.

tricky D

As Tony says, the logo isn't great. Using a cursive font in logos isn't usually a good idea nor is an illustration. See the other logos down the left hand side. I'd use a non-cursive font and omit the cello, and use some stylised crochet for the 'oo' in school.

The header image has quite a lot of height taking up 40% of my screen, try to reduce that a bit.

Welcome can be omitted as it's implied anyway.

Again to expand on Tony's point on the target audience's: the current text doesn't properly address them, users usually scan homepage body text as opposed to reading it, so it has to be snappier than blocks of text. A good format for this is: you got an issue/you want a service; we have the solution; call to action (get in touch, book now!).

Get a WordPress plugin to rewrite your page URLs in a descriptive form eg. http://www.athenrymusicschool.net/location.html instead of http://www.athenrymusicschool.net/?page_id=309 for SEO and descritive purposes.

Stick a Google map in the location.

Faculty is really Staff.

Put a bit of padding into your table cells on the pricing, timetable and any other pages with tables.

Include the year more in your timetable/event info and remove past dates as appropriate.

The 2 clickable images in Orchestras & Ensembles could get a gallery treatment.

Try to get feedback from happy customers.

Use FaceBook and Twitter for some social networking.

On the booking form, let users know how the process works and how and when you'll get in touch. Having just 'Your message was sent successfully. Thanks.' leaves users thinking, now what?

The meta descriptions appear to be the same on all pages. They should be individualised to reflect the content of each individual page, the same way the title tags which appear in the browser tabs are done.

hope that help and good luck