1st ever site xtreme/designer

Firstly my gratitude to eggbram and xaraxhris for the youtube tutorials they have kindly contributed. I would not have been able to get this far without the countless hours of viewing, viewing again and again! I have never actually done a proper website before so this is my first attempt at seeing the whole process right through to actually loading up to a host server. In the past i;ve messed around with mock designs but always left them at that.


I am helping my brother inlaw to get his new business off the ground, he is an installer for digital TV equipment-aerials, satellite etc. I wanted to get a fresh look but obviously due to the nature of the business also wanted a couple of bells and whistles using flash etc. I have tried my best to keep the flash subtle as too much can be well, just too much!.

In total there are 19 pages to this site, 1 is the redirect to a 'thank you' page after contact form submit. I have managed to intergrate paypal (after a few 'smash the head on the desk' moments, but got there in the end)

I probably need to work on my search engine stuff to get it more efficient google listings etc-have done the bits in web properties but need to work out the extra placeholder things you can do(I read about putting code in the header or something?)

Think I have grouped the images as best as possible for loading but would like some views on this please.

I have tested in explorer7&8 and firefox, both seem okay bar the small 'paypal' logos, which in firefox appear to move a little from where they should be.

Friends and family all like the look but I need views from people who don't care about crushing my ego if you know what I mean!

http://www.digital3000.co.uk

Very tidy site Antspants, I like it.
Only issue that caught my eye was the paypal graphic on the receiver page seemed to have slipped down too far when viewed with Google Chrome, Opera and FireFox.

I'd also suggest that many images could be forced to export as JPG because the site was a little slower to load than I would like on a 20 mbit ADSL2 connection.

Many thanks for the feedback.

I have converted to jpegs and the file sizes are smaller so load quicker-doesn't look as though quality is lost too much?

Placeholder positioning for the paypay html seems a bit hit and miss so have removed the small 'paypal' logo icons but managed to get position on the main icon for the 'receivers' page. I checked in firefox and chrome and seem okay.

Considering how small/niche the village of Heacham is I'm baffled as to why the site doesn't show on a search engine at all when using: 'digital aerials installation heacham uk'. I have them as key words in the meta tags?. It seems to get to the top/show at all only when I include digital3000 in the search title. There are many discussions on this topic I know, so will search here and try to learn how to get things optimised on the search engines.

Again thank you for the help.

ooops just viewed on another machine and notice that none of the flash from the placeholders will work when using firefox etc only works on IE.

When I view from the machine which I used to upload to server, all the flash etc works fine in all browsers. Any ides what I need to do?

Thanks

had to add adobe to add-ons in the firefox browser, seems to be okay now

Antspants,

A lot of your text has been converted to graphics, google cant read images. Img alt text will help but is never as good as the real thing.

Key words in the meta tags will not help you much, apart from click through rate for a well written description meta tag.

The title tag is the biggest hitter as regards on page optimisation, just think what words a potential customer would type into a search engine. For aerials.htm I would suggest something like "Aerial Installation for Freeview Digital TV :: Heacham, Norfolk" using no more than 65 characters. Then sprinkle the emboldened words amongst your body text.

That should get you off to a good start :) nice site btw

Drwyd

thank you so much for the advice. Sorry for the delayed response-I wanted to get some of the changes you suggest done before replying.

I have now ungrouped most of the text content from the other images and have changed the title content for the first 5 main pages. I have changed some of the body text so as to repeat the title content-I will keep working on this.

Ungrouping the text from other graphics also makes the text much much sharper when viewing on the web-I didn't realise just how 'blurred' it looked before.

Quote:

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The title tag is the biggest hitter as regards on page optimisation, just think what words a potential customer would type into a search engine. For aerials.htm I would suggest something like "Aerial Installation for Freeview Digital TV :: Heacham, Norfolk" using no more than 65 characters. Then sprinkle the emboldened words amongst your body text

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The above piece of advice is invaluable to me many thanks!- I have had problems getting a clear understanding of how 'that' part of things works but am starting to get it now!

Actually to be honest I think 90% of my efforts were on the visual look and getting it right etc that I have totally negleted the actual content (the boring bit!). This has helped me re-focus on whats important. Again many thanks.

Glad I could help :-)

You might be interested to know that the phrase "digital uk" is searched for 201,000 times per month in the uk and it is a relatively uncompetetive (un-targeted) phrase. It might be an idea to work this in to your content somewhere i.e. "We provide supply and installation services for free to view digital UK TV."

Other keywords/phrases that might attract traffic without too much effort are:

aerial indoor - 60,500 searches/month
digital switchover - 60,500 searches/month
caravan aerial - 40,500 searches/month
digital installation - 33,100 searches/month

(note that the order of the words in the phrase can be important)


P.S.
I would also recommend that you sign up for Google Analytics so that you can keep an eye on web traffic ... very useful for testing what works and what does'nt

many thanks.

Have the hosting with 123reg and have activated google analytics which takes upto 48hrs.

I have re-designed the head banner with new text and stuff along with ungrouping the rest of the site text from graphics. I've started to manipulate some of the key words/phrases on the individual pages and will keep working on this.

All the best.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Drwyd

Glad I could help :-)

Other keywords/phrases that might attract traffic without too much effort are:

aerial indoor - 60,500 searches/month
digital switchover - 60,500 searches/month
caravan aerial - 40,500 searches/month
digital installation - 33,100 searches/month

(note that the order of the words in the phrase can be important)

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Drwyd - Can I ask how you got these figures did you a software like Omniture or any other apid for software?

Googles adwords keyword tool

Thanks mate...

Great!!!

It's amazing what can be achieved with Xara. So much work must have gone in to this.

well done

Kash