Site review

tatrman

Hi,

Just completed the first version of our portfolio website. Any comments are welcome.

http://www.webintelligence.ie

T.

Squeeonline

I would make the titles also in the anchor tags that expand squares. The little arrows are hard to click.


You're crazy about social networks so you built your own and copied Facebook in doing so. Bad move. It looks like a phishing site as you've used the same colour of blue too (#3B5998)
http://www.bluepat.com/

no favicon

Personally don't like the colour scheme.

<a class="image" href="http://localhost/yii/wi/index.php?r=card"&gt; need to fix that.

You are using <b> tags instead of <strong> in the code. Also in some cases you should be using a header tag for that.

tatrman

Squeeonline wrote: »

I would make the titles also in the anchor tags that expand squares. The little arrows are hard to click.


You're crazy about social networks so you built your own and copied Facebook in doing so. Bad move. It looks like a phishing site as you've used the same colour of blue too (#3B5998)
http://www.bluepat.com/

no favicon

Personally don't like the colour scheme.

<a class="image" href="http://localhost/yii/wi/index.php?r=card"&gt; need to fix that.

You are using <b> tags instead of <strong> in the code. Also in some cases you should be using a header tag for that.

thanks for the review. You have good points.

tricky D

Poor SEO including basic bad practices which may incur penalties, yet you say you offer a SEO service at a master level.

Poor/missing contact details.

Mish-mash colour scheme and identity.

Broken Social Media links all pointing to LinkedIn - sloppy.

RBN missing - required for Ltd company.

Low on information and a single page which is poor for SEO.

What are Web2.0 standards?

American English, bad English and some misspellings.

Badly resized images from massively oversized originals.

Unstyled button. CSS bloated with junk.

Poor typography, copywriting, accesssibility.

Poor/bad post form submission implementation.

+1 on FB rip-off, phishing and reinventing wheels.

hth

tatrman

Hi trickyD,

thanks for the comprehensive list of faults. most of it is already on the agenda.

I can't agree however with any accusation of fishing as it clearly states it is demo site and FB login page looks different, neither with "reinventing wheel" point as there is no intention to build any FB competitor, but offer the software solution for organizations, schools or companies to build their own online communities.

anyway thanks again for valuable comments.

Squeeonline

*claims to not be ripping off Facebook*
*uses exactly the same colour blue*
*uses similar font*
*top login area identical to Fb*

I believe your intentions weren't to copy facebook. No one could have tried to copy it and make that much of a hash of it.

maxmarmalade

Poor SEO including basic bad practices which may incur penalties, yet you say you offer a SEO service at a master level.

Poor/missing contact details.

Mish-mash colour scheme and identity.

Broken Social Media links all pointing to LinkedIn - sloppy.

RBN missing - required for Ltd company.

Low on information and a single page which is poor for SEO.

What are Web2.0 standards?

American English, bad English and some misspellings.

Badly resized images from massively oversized originals.

Unstyled button. CSS bloated with junk.

Poor typography, copywriting, accesssibility.

Poor/bad post form submission implementation.

+1 on FB rip-off, phishing and reinventing wheels.

hth

Hi
I'm involved with Web Intelligence too. @tatrman should have stressed we are specifically looking for feedback on the look and feel of the site, as it's quite the difference. We tried to be a bit unique to differentiate ourselves from other web design websites. We know SEO is poor, we haven't looked at it yet.

The reason everything is on one page is we haven't much to our portfolio yet. I realise this affects our SEO but anyway, we have been getting our clients through word of mouth. Once we get more work, we will seperate it out.

With the demo community site, we are simply demonstrating what we can do for an organisation/community. We have a few different themes which we switch between. The facebook theme was just a bit of fun. Check it out now, we've changed to another theme www.bluepat.com. So I think people missed the point here, but that's our fault, we haven't made it clear. This demo site will soon switch to www.demo.webintelligence.ie, so there should be less confusion.

A better demonstration of a social network we have built is (over 6 months) www.skillterest.com. It's in beta so hold off on criticism. I'm surprised nobody commented on this.

As for poor typography - you mean you dont like the font? There aren't that many fonts common to all platforms...

Can you point to bad English/spell errors? We don't mind using American English - we target that market for clients.

So to stress again, could feedback be focused on look and feel?

I believe your intentions weren't to copy facebook. No one could have tried to copy it and make that much of a hash of it.

@Squeeonline - we'd appreciate constructive criticism only please.

tricky D

maxmarmalade wrote: »

Hi
I'm involved with Web Intelligence too. @tatrman should have stressed we are specifically looking for feedback on the look and feel of the site, as it's quite the difference. We tried to be a bit unique to differentiate ourselves from other web design websites. We know SEO is poor, we haven't looked at it yet.

SEO is best done as you go along as opposed to tacked on afterwards.

maxmarmalade wrote: »

The reason everything is on one page is we haven't much to our portfolio yet. I realise this affects our SEO but anyway, we have been getting our clients through word of mouth. Once we get more work, we will seperate it out.

I'd say you actually do have enough, you just need to leverage what's there better.

maxmarmalade wrote: »

With the demo community site, we are simply demonstrating what we can do for an organisation/community. We have a few different themes which we switch between. The facebook theme was just a bit of fun. Check it out now, we've changed to another theme www.bluepat.com. So I think people missed the point here, but that's our fault, we haven't made it clear. This demo site will soon switch to www.demo.webintelligence.ie, so there should be less confusion.

A better demonstration of a social network we have built is (over 6 months) www.skillterest.com. It's in beta so hold off on criticism. I'm surprised nobody commented on this.

It wasn't asked for.

maxmarmalade wrote: »

As for poor typography - you mean you dont like the font? There aren't that many fonts common to all platforms...

You can import fonts these days and typography is not merely confined to font choice but also usage.

maxmarmalade wrote: »

Can you point to bad English/spell errors? We don't mind using American English - we target that market for clients.

Email Marketing
We design marketing emails and newsletters and take care off all the mass-mailing.

of

As for US vs UK, you're using a .ie and your client base appears to be mainly Irish based so UK is more apt.

maxmarmalade wrote: »

So to stress again, could feedback be focused on look and feel?

Mish-mash colour scheme and identity. WUX/UI methods could be better eg. hiding content requiring user to think to get it, that's if they notice the poor contrast arrows.

maxmarmalade wrote: »

@Squeeonline - we'd appreciate constructive criticism only please.

It's a valid matter and the user's other feedback has been constructive as your colleague has noted.

maxmarmalade

@tricky D

Anything positive to say whatsoever? Or do you suggest we start all over again?

maxmarmalade

SEO is best done as you go along as opposed to tacked on afterwards.

I wouldn't agree with this whatsoever. I've seen SEO experts come in and spend half a day on a website and get them on first page of Google. It can absolutely be "tacked on afterwards". I've done it before.

tricky D

Really bad idea. Content has a major bearing on design and that content is important SEO juice. They are not seperate matters due to their inter-realtionship, if done properly.

Designing a site without such an important marketing function in mind is simply a bad idea. This should be obvious.

http://searchengineland.com/24-ways-to-make-life-hard-for-your-seo-team-115745

11. Doing SEO "After The Fact" – Do It Right Or Do It Over!
The most common variation of this mistake is launching a new website or a site redesign and then bringing in the SEO team. What do you mean the CMS I picked is SEO hostile? What? The title tag for every page on the site is required to be the same? There are session IDs on the URLs? Yup, I have seen all of these mistakes and more.

12. Not Starting SEO Soon Enough (Due To Scope Of Dev Impact)
Even after you get the idea that you must involve SEO planning up front, there is still an issue of not starting soon enough. What if the SEO input leads you to realize that you have to re-architect the site? Far easier to let development know that before they are well down the path. Consider SEO a key part of the product/site requirements definition process.

17. Finalizing A Site Architecture Without SEO Team Input
This is similar to the CMS line item. There is a lot of useful input that the SEO team can have here. Don’t let the SEO input be the sole source of input to a site architecture as usability and user experience factors are a big deal here, but an awareness of keywords that matter is important to take into account too.

maxmarmalade

tricky D wrote: »

Really bad idea. Content has a major bearing on design and that content is important SEO juice. They are not seperate matters due to their inter-realtionship, if done properly.

Designing a site without such an important marketing function in mind is simply a bad idea. This should be obvious.

http://searchengineland.com/24-ways-to-make-life-hard-for-your-seo-team-115745

With our simple portfolio site, SEO can obviously be tacked on later, without question. With larger sites, its harder (though I've seen it done very very effectively).

Discounting SEO, would you suggest we start over again?

One thing I didnt mention is the site works very nicely depending on device e.g. it changes to 2 columns for smaller screens and 1 column on mobile phones. We wanted to emphasise our expertise in developing a site which optimizes for all devices, hence the columns. I will make this much more clear on the site that users should test on their other devices.