Website fine tuning assistance

[Suzanne]

So long story short I have built a website for my brothers company... It needs some fine tuning and more work (Only 18 hours in).
1. Picture slider buttons still link to the wonder Xara website...I looked for all the links to and haven't found were it's hiding. Suggestions?
2. If it's possible I have yet to be able to resize a picture slider...so to provide my client with their design layout I layered an unmoving graphic over the right side... Picture slider has a text box at bottom that is overlaying that graphic. Can these be resized? Is there a way to keep it from overlaying my graphic?
3. Also the tiling effect on the slider.......I cannot find where to change it. One of those thought I found it but it didn't change items.......(slide in right)
4. Form solutions? What do you use?.... I had to tweak how the wufoo was working for the estimate request....now once you've gone there I have lost them off the site.. I need a better solution.
5. Mobile phone number dialing... The number at the top right for emergency services isn't linking for mobile dialing. Is this because of how I grouped it maybe? Sorry newbie question...it got late last night.

Yes I do know I have a lot more work...drop down links, pages to complete, and even more to build in the future, details and more details.

Www.4myleak.com - my site

Lame big business site www.rescuerooferca.com

So why did I make it live?
Longer Story Alert- If not interested stop reading now
I had a small temporary site up so the space wasn't being wasted and nonexistent when looked up.
My brother has been difficult to get a concept out of and I am an amateur at web design so in December a regional sales guy (who sold himself as the hands on designer) sells my brother on website design and Search Engine Optimization. I'm okay with it considering the should be the experts and I know little of SEO and want my brother to be findable and successful. He said new site would take about 4 weeks. 6 weeks later the sent him a link to a site that didn't even have his logo on it. He had a basic site that they were given to refer to. My brother has already branded himself all they had do to was back it up. (Check out his ambulance and fire truck, I did his vinyls ) The content is unintelligent and irrelevant for the work and location he is at. Poor guy has been back and forth on the phone to the other side of the country (which is what he wanted to avoid) sending them labeled pictures they couldn't even place right. So I set down and put together a detailed outline and some other websites to refer to for what my brother wanted and sent it off on Friday night. My brother said he wanted to cancel so they went and put his site live, claiming its so the sales guy can make changes himself.....more like trying to solidify his unfulfilled contract. After reviewing the outline we were told they couldn't change the template (which was rejected repeatedly) but we may be able to get you the look and feel of what you want. After my brother asked what he meant by look and feel he scheduled another meeting....
So basically I am proving to a salesman that an amateur can build a site in a couple of days when his company couldn't manage it in over two months.
Even more hilarious the first meeting I had with him he pitched me a job offer in the future for sales as they are new to my area. Really!? You can't sell what a company can't perform....at least I can't I prefer to keep my customers happy and sleep at night.

[gwpriester]

Welcome to TalkGraphics Suzanne

I think you are off to a great start on these two sites.

[Suzanne]

Just to clarify www.4myleak.com is my work.
The other is a template filled by a large corporation pumping out websites professing high SEO ratings.

[Cloud]

Hi Suzanne, loath though I am to say it but the other site by hibu looks more professional, but the gap is not so much that yours could not be far better:

The width of your site is far too narrow, consider a minimum of 960px

Header
The logo looks squashed into a tight space, give it plenty of breathing space (or white space) so that it stands out. The navigation menu needs considering, firstly the text is too small, a minimum of 16px for the menu, especially the navigation links at the top right (about us), that is really small. Your roll over on the menu covers the button next to it (it is misaligned). Keep the menu as simple as you can. The 24hr emergency section; consider a different colour to make it stand out, perhaps green as that is an action colour. (set the link for this to: tel:yournumber to allow direct dialing from mobiles)

You also need more text on the home page for the sake of SEO. Add a page name, I suggest Emergency Roof Repair, Lodi (or whatever area you want to cover), at the moment it just shows 'Index' this is a massive mistake as it really effects SEO.

For the rest of the pages; you should have clear distinct columns, text should be in separate columns to pictures/graphics. Also stay away from gradients, they really do date a site.

[Suzanne]

@skech

Thank you thank you thank you!
This is the kind of feed back I needed.
I have been building off the Xara trader template and modifying based on the customers design vision.
But info like "You also need more text on the home page for the sake of SEO. Add a page name, I suggest Emergency Roof Repair, Lodi (or whatever area you want to cover), at the moment it just shows 'Index' this is a massive mistake as it really effects SEO."
is huge.
I did notice the index title I missed changing after I loaded it..........big mistake.

Do you know a good resource for educating myself on SEO do's and don'ts that is current enough to follow as a base guideline?

[Cloud]

Other then on-page SEO (I'll come to that in a bit) do not neglect off-page SEO, firstly sign up for a google webmaster tools account, this makes a very big difference, and together with that you have your google analytics account. Make sure that you have a sitemap (xara does this automatically when you enter the websites domain name in the 'Publish' properties.

Secondly, once your site is online start creating the backlinks; forums are very good for this (this forum especially), though beware that a lot of forums now have 'NoFollow' links so for backlinks they are no good, but the more people who go to your website the better so they have their uses. Plus if you can get some backlinks from academic institutions or government ones then you are flying because google gives them far more weight.

Now we get to the most important aspect of SEO; on-page.

Firstly decide which keyword you want to target, remember one keyword per page, and do not use it more than 5 or 6 times on the page as it will be seen as spamming by the search engines. As I suggested earlier - use the keyword in the page title and make sure that the same keyword appears exactly as it does on the page title. If you want to check the popularity of a keyword you can use googles keyword advertising tools which show how popular a certain keyword or key phrase is, no point being number one for a keyword if no one actually searches for it.

Next; CONTENT!, make sure that it is original, that it makes sense to a human reader and do not repeat it on the other pages of your site if you can. Remember that CONTENT IS KING.

Also don't neglect Yahoo, sign up for an account and submit your site to that and to Bing as well.

Once your site is done then test it, speed makes a big difference so test it on http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/ it will tell you how fast the site is loading and if there are any problems with large sized images etc.

Other than that there are plenty of resources on the web - but remember one thing, some people will say that a certain technique (in terms of SEO) works and that some techniques are no longer applicable but what I have suggested above WORK, I have over 100 websites I have done SEO for to prove that fact.

But do not neglect the look of the site, once the seo gets someone to your site, you want to keep them there and present a professional image which gets them contacting you, to be honest (my apologies but you need to know this); at the moment I would not be contacting the company to fix my roof, going by the look of the site I would think that either the company had closed down 7 or 8 years ago or would not trust them to do a good job, it's like giving a hand written quote or a business card which looks like it was printed off a machine at a train station.

[Suzanne]

Thank you for your honesty. If I can't take a critique then I have become unteachable.
I have replaced the site with my original design that I have been working out without the "I want my site like that one" vision of my brother .

Still feel like my front page is super lacking yet I don't want to clutter it up.