reviews please

byrybak

made a lot of changes to the site since mine last post few months ago, got someone to improve seo aswel. just looking for some honest advise and opinion. thanks for looking.

http://www.byrybak.com

tricky D

Homepage text is poor and is appears as a wall of hard to read text. Break it into small snappy chunks of easily read text.

Header/banner is still has way too much height.

The dark colour scheme is not what I would use for a painters website.

The SEO is still poor. I can't see what improvement your SEO person made. The heading1s are badly implemented and attention to keywords/phrases and location info could be greatly improved. Making all the text strong isn't what I would view as good SEO practice.

WTF is the Colours page all about!?

byrybak

tricky D wrote: »

Homepage text is poor and is appears as a wall of hard to read text. Break it into small snappy chunks of easily read text.

Header/banner is still has way too much height.

The dark colour scheme is not what I would use for a painters website.

The SEO is still poor. I can't see what improvement your SEO person made. The heading1s are badly implemented and attention to keywords/phrases and location info could be greatly improved. Making all the text strong isn't what I would view as good SEO practice.

WTF is the Colours page all about!?

thanks for u post trickyD
1. colours page is basicly all most popular brand of paints, u dont have to browse all different pages u can all of it in one page ~(to be honest not too sure about it myself)
2. will definetely let my seo lad know about ur opinion.

thanks for that

byrybak

some more seo done, would like someone who knows his stuff to review website. Tricky D ur i find ur reviews very helpful :-)

endacl

tricky D wrote: »

The dark colour scheme is not what I would use for a painters website.

FWIW, I disagree with this point. The dark scheme meant the first things I saw were the bright rooms. Your work really jumped off the screen. Nice job.

M.T.D

regarding the seo
you have what I would expect to be the keywords in the Title tag, description tags.
The h tags are another matter, on one page the whole content is an h3 tag.
The site is in joomla (BTW you still have the default joomla favicon) and you are using a theme with style sheets but almost all the content is in a <span> that has style code on the page rather than in the .ccs file, applies to some of the divs as well.
Your "services" page has no text content so won't ever rank for anything. The pages that describe your services have very little content and are not very focused either.
As far as I understand the search engines (Google) index the content of a page, and how that page gets ranked is in the lap of the "Google God" but this can be influenced in several ways, having a reasonable amount of well written content, putting what you regard as important "keywords/phrases" in strategic places (title, description h1, h2 h3 ...) using the key phrase/s more than once. All things are relative so having the whole page as h3 or bold or italic etc is the same as plain text just harder to read.
If you are going to pay for SEO work get the content right first, there are a lot of painters in Dublin to compete with.
It is probably a good idea to get a .xml site map for the bots as well, set the priority of your services pages high and the likes of the contact page low, this is also relative so setting everything high has no effect.
There are lots of other things that can be adjusted as well.
If you want a full site analysis with list of what could/should be done PM me (not free)

tricky D

endacl wrote: »

FWIW, I disagree with this point. The dark scheme meant the first things I saw were the bright rooms. Your work really jumped off the screen. Nice job.

Fair point, though I still wouldn't have it so dark.

endacl

tricky D wrote: »

Fair point, though I still wouldn't have it so dark.

Well, I'm no expert. That was just my first impression. First impressions do count. I've often navigated away from a site that just immediately just 'annoyed' me, if you know what I mean?

Squeeonline

On "colours" page the iframes are really annoying. Like really just crap. There has got to be a better way of doing it. See what your competitors have done for ideas.

Default Joomla favicon. Change it.

"About Us" when it's clearly a sole trader, it feels unfinished and impersonal. "About me" might be better.

"painter for a day" gif looks rough and not smooth.

For some reason your blog is hosted on blogspot rather than locally. Doesn't really make sense since you have a joomla install. Would be better to keep everything on the same site.

byrybak

iframes from "colours" page are gone, i just put a simple links to each brand colours page. it looks better in my opinion.

TsuDhoNimh

M.T.D wrote: »

Your "services" page has no text content so won't ever rank for anything. The pages that describe your services have very little content and are not very focused either.

Aside from the issue of it not helping that you won't be able to rank for relevant keywords by lacking content, it also drops the overall quality of your domain in the search engines eyes (thin content, wasted crawl budget, etc.) so an area you certainly want to address.

M.T.D wrote: »

All things are relative so having the whole page as h3 or bold or italic etc is the same as plain text just harder to read.

It's actually worse than having it as just plain text as it won't be carrying benefits (for the reasons MTD outlined), yet might be flagging potential attempts at manipulation so could be carrying a negative impact.

A few other points from an extremely quick glance...

Have the SEO company remove their footer link immediately. It's been a while since I came across one putting a sitewide footer link on a clients site, surprising (and/or disappointing) it's still happening in this day and age.

Have your SEO company sort out some of the technical basics of your site setup. If they haven't gone to the trouble of sorting out issues like the duplication between your www and non www pages, I imagine they haven't covered many of the SEO 101 basics to date.

As previously mentioned, is there a reason why your blog is being left off the domain and not incorporated into the site? I can't see any reason that I'd agree with to avoid migrating the blog to your own domain (the only real negative of doing it will be the time required, which will be more than offset by the gains achieved by doing it).

You've got a contact form on the site, so you're legally required to provide a privacy policy that outlines how the information submitted via the site can/will be used. It'll help with user trust in the site, so while it needs to be done for legal reasons it does carry benefits.

(Separate comment, but potentially related to trust as mentioned above, consider having a local landline contact number available [can easily be a virtual landline diverting to a mobile if required]. It's mainly for the increased trust it provides, but I've also experienced very mixed results with the use of LoCall numbers here in Ireland. People expect and understand a landline number, even if they choose not to use it.

Also worth mentioning to keep the formatting of your contact details consistent. Even on the site itself I can see the mobile number listed in a couple of different formats, which hurts your local search results. Keep it consistent, whatever format you decide on, on your own site and anywhere/everywhere else it's listed. [As it's not really an international service you provide, I'd personally suggest dropping the international dialling code from the number and just retaining the local format])

You've got a large header imagine on the site which, at the moment, contains nothing other than the logo (which users tend to expect to link back to the homepage, so worth adding a hyperlink there) and a number (which isn't even part of the content of the page). This is the most valuable real estate on your site but is currently going to waste. I'd look at incorporating whatever news/products/services/calls to action you feel will have the most impact as part of a carousel in the header to gain more value from the space.

byrybak wrote: »

iframes from "colours" page are gone, i just put a simple links to each brand colours page. it looks better in my opinion.

I can't see what value this page is adding for the customer?

Is it to explain the variety of paints you work with? Is it simply to show them what colours are available from a handful of suppliers?

Whatever the reason for it is, explain it on the page. At the moment it contains no value for your users, carries no information that a search engine would deem valuable for a user and makes it look like you're simply looking at sending a few questionable links out (I know that you're not, but if looking at a page like that algorithmically it would appear that way).

If there isn't anything valuable to place on that page that is important for a potential client to see, I'd suggest removing the 'Colour' link from your navigation menu entirely and (if you do decide to retain the page) instead just link to it as/when appropriate from the relevant individual pages. It's gaining a lot of your internal authority at the moment, which is pretty much going to waste. Focus the menus and links in prominent pages to your important/valuable pages (something your SEO provider should be guiding you on and helping you to shape your site architecture).

byrybak

TsuDhoNimh wrote: »

You've got a contact form on the site, so you're legally required to provide a privacy policy that outlines how the information submitted via the site can/will be used. It'll help with user trust in the site, so while it needs to be done for legal reasons it does carry benefits.

.

thanks for all ur suggestions.
bit by bit i will get it sorted:D

privacy policy added below contact form, i just used free privacy policy generator website.

byrybak

TsuDhoNimh wrote: »

Also worth mentioning to keep the formatting of your contact details consistent. Even on the site itself I can see the mobile number listed in a couple of different formats, which hurts your local search results. Keep it consistent, whatever format you decide on, on your own site and anywhere/everywhere else it's listed. [As it's not really an international service you provide, I'd personally suggest dropping the international dialling code from the number and just retaining the local format])

.

Belive it or not i got few phone calls from abroad about getting houses/apartments painted in dublin for people living in spain/portugal etc.
so i think having +353 prior to my mobile number is helpful in some cases.
but thats only my opinion.

Dazza

byrybak wrote: »

Belive it or not i got few phone calls from abroad about getting houses/apartments painted in dublin for people living in spain/portugal etc.
so i think having +353 prior to my mobile number is helpful in some cases.
but thats only my opinion.

You have your number formatted wrong on the site.
It should be +353 86xxxxxxx
Homepage seems a bit too packed with information.

byrybak

Dazza wrote: »

You have your number formatted wrong on the site.
It should be +353 86xxxxxxx
Homepage seems a bit too packed with information.

sorry but i dont know what u mean by +353 86xxxx

Mobile contact: +353 (0) 857124092
that what i have on the website which is 2 in 1 as +353 is from abroad and 085xxxx is from ireland.

thanks for review anyway:)

Dazza

Think I was a bit blunt there. From what I know the +353 replaces the 0 in the phone number.

SweetCaliber

I'm probably a little late but however.

I disagree with the dark colors, painting I think is about positive energy. If someone want's their house painted and goes onto a dark dreary dull website, your just going to drain the "fun" out of them. Although here is a quick and rough design I threw together in 2 minutes just as an example as where I would start.



It's bright and it's appealing to the eye. Of course there's a lot to be done but as I said its a 2 minute design just to show you where I would start if I was designing a website like yours.

byrybak

lee3155 wrote: »

I'm probably a little late but however.

I disagree with the dark colors, painting I think is about positive energy. If someone want's their house painted and goes onto a dark dreary dull website, your just going to drain the "fun" out of them. Although here is a quick and rough design I threw together in 2 minutes just as an example as where I would start.



It's bright and it's appealing to the eye. Of course there's a lot to be done but as I said its a 2 minute design just to show you where I would start if I was designing a website like yours.

everyone likes different things and designs, to be honest i dont like ur design at all:o
it was me who design ,my website and im very happy with colours.
thanks for that anyway:)

SweetCaliber

byrybak wrote: »

everyone likes different things and designs, to be honest i dont like ur design at all:o
it was me who design ,my website and im very happy with colours.
thanks for that anyway:)

It's okay! It only took me two minutes to throw together, oh and like I said it's where I'd start. Doesn't necessarily mean you would have to start at the same place.

The best way for you I think is to listen to other peoples advice and try and maneuver it into your own website.

TsuDhoNimh

I can't say I'm the least bit surprised to hear you've gotten calls from clients abroad. I still stick with my original comment though, that it's a local service (the client doesn't need to be here, but the house does). In that case, the client in question will know that +353 is the international dialling code for Ireland and won't need to be prompted to do so.

byrybak wrote: »

Mobile contact: +353 (0) 857124092
that what i have on the website which is 2 in 1 as +353 is from abroad and 085xxxx is from ireland.

The biggest problem here is that semantically that's not what the number is saying. The algorithms are smart and I've seen them able to identify both "08xxxxxxxx" and "08x xxxxxx", but by adding in the international dialing code (which again they can recognise) along with the local code in brackets... you're really pushing them to the limits (I can't say for sure that they'll fail, it would be my assumption that they would, as I've never tested it as it's nasty for usability in any case).

Aside from the fact that this isn't how the number is written consistently across your own site (I seen it at least two different ways on one page, there are possibly others), I imagine if I was to check across a variety of different sources I would find it inconsistent across those as well.

In terms of 'local search' (ensuring Google prioritise your site for Dublin/Irish related searches) keeping your number consistent is a big plus (it isn't essential, nothing ever is, but it is important). Personally, I'd strongly suggest using "085 7124092" (no brackets, no international dialing code and nothing but exactly what's in the quotes there), but if you feel strongly about "+353 85 7124092" you can use that. Either way, once you choose one... use it exclusively. Everywhere your number shows up on the internet, make sure it's in that format.