Website Review

The Gibmiester

Hi Guys,

Looking for some feedback: milliestearooms.com (can't post links )

Still waiting on some more content before I do any SEO. Also considering some mobile optimisations, time depending.

Thanks!

tricky D

General

SEO and content should be integrated at the same(ish) in the dev path especially with the content strands. It's a bad thing to consider them as in isolation from each other. Tagging on SEO at a later stage is a bad idea. As is, there are no meta keywords or any og: tags to control listings contents.

Not having a Responsive WordPress theme or the time to do one doesn't cut the mustard as there are shedloads of responsive themes out there.

No 404 page.

Not the most elegant URLs.

Homepage

Christmas Experience Booking button is premature. It's too early in the content and should be a call-to-action after copy selling the experience.

From the homepage content, I would never guess that this is a tea room with a petting farm. This is a major selling point and should occupy the centre of the homepage instead of the weak text copy there.

'I have neglected the page for a while...not enough days in the week!!' is a negative message, besides marketing the business is part of the regular job not an add-on, so the requisite hour or so weekly should be part of regular tasks.

Just use more regular branded icons for the Social Media box items, the current treatment doesn't work so well.

Menus

There are none. The core menu(s) should be there with daily specials added every morning. (see the point 2 paras up). There is no good reason not to have them up when it's more or less the same as doing up the daily specials chalkboard or the daily Facebook menu specials updates which must be done at the start of every day.

Gallery

You have nice plugin for it with captions and Social Media links available, but sdome of the items aren't really gallery items (menu, FB check-in, tiny logo) and the images sizes are all over the place, make them consistent. Hopefully it will also work better under a Responsive theme than currently.

You also have a menu hidden in there as an image. Insert the menu content as text only, not an image and certainly not as a PDF.

There should be loads of photos (though 30 is usually enough) of food, the petting farm, kids play areas, people having fun including 'your friendly hosts'.

Play Area page

There's nothing there at alls o a major selling point is neglected.

No contact form. Consider putting the contact details in the footer of all pages with map and form. Make sure the map, the G+ acc and Local are set up properly for extra Google juice.

Xmas Experience page has no proper info on well anything bar the price. Quality Sales oriented copy is required here, then a call to action.



Your biggest problem developing this site is the content providers and getting them motivated and selling the value of getting the web presence right with stuff like the daily morning updates which must be done right otherwise customers will be annoyed with out of date specials info. This problem of getting the management to get into the right gear and keeping them there is quite common with restaurant owners im my experience.

The Gibmiester

Thanks for the feedback! Agree with the remarks about the content.

There is a 404 page. milliestearooms.com/wp/index.php/play-area/test

I made the gallery plugin myself. It pulls down the images from the Facebook fanpage and puts them into a jQuery prettyPhoto plugin. Unfortunately this also does include all the images and I have less control over sizing. It does however provide an easy way for the user to add images to their site. I will probably change this to use a dedicated Facebook album or just ignore certain images.

I also wrote the plugin on the homepage which fetches the most recent Facebook status. Thought this was a nice idea at the time but I suppose it only looks as good as the last status.

I thought contact forms had got a bit dated? Any other opinions on this?

tricky D

Contact forms are still very much in play. There can be many reasons why a user might not have their email client available: could be on a phone which is not hooked up to their email account, browsing on a friend's device or other scenarios where just a mailto won't suffice.

Dub_Steve

Design looks great very unique. But you do need to add a contact form. Great photos of the cakes

robet001

All is well and design also too much attractive just need to update metas.