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Suggestions and opinions on site please

by birneyj
6 replies
  • WEB DESIGN
    • |
I am redesigning a website and considering scrapping the whole thing and going with word press for this site. Any insight would be great.

I am looking for the following:

Constructive criticism either good or bad....
Opinions on Google ranking, Do you think that the site will be penalized for a complete redesign??
Do you think a wordpress site would rank better in this application??

I am currently ranking pretty good for a few of my keywords.

The old site, which i am ranking for, is pslandscaping(DOT)com
The new site not submitted yet is pslandscaping(DOT)net
The wordpress site is not started yet.

Thanks in advance
Jim
#opinions #site #suggestions
  • Profile picture of the author ItalianoDinero
    pslandscaping(DOT)com - the biggest thing with this I find is the navigation. It becomes confusing when people click for example links and it moves it around thus making it difficult for people to navigate.

    pslandscaping(DOT)net - nicely put together however the header image should remain the same throughout or if you want it to change/rotate you should have a different image for each page. The email address I suggest add a contact form because the email could be crawled and then spammed.

    Hope these suggestions help.
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  • Profile picture of the author osegoly
    For pslandscaping.net I would redesign the nav bar. Use a different font, a different color for the div background, and a different hover effect. As of now, the hover effect makes it very hard to read. You should also add some CSS styling to your content links (e.g. Outdoor Design Ideas). In fact, I would look into displaying Outdoor Design Ideas as a sidebar on the homepage. For the Sample Photos, if you're going to use a shadow effect use a PNG file or stick with a JPG but match the background colors because right now it is white. I suggest that you get better quality images for this page. That should get you started.

    Also, I highly recommend wordpress.

    Good luck.
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  • Profile picture of the author Branding_bible
    i think i slightly prefer the old site myself, it looks a little more modern, the .net site looks quite dated in its design to me.

    How important is the website to your business? if it's fairly important i'd seriously consider having a designer give you a hand with it. As it stands there's lots of little things that all add up to it looking amateurish and not overly professional, and I only say that to be brutally honest about what I think when I view it, I wouldn't be doing you any favours in saying it's great when that's not what i'm actually thinking

    I'd try the changes mentioned above and see how you feel about it after that. Maybe checkout your competitions websites and see how it sits in with them in look and feel. It might come out well, or it might not really be doing you justice, in which case i'd always advise trying to lift the bar, why shouldn't your website be the best
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    • Profile picture of the author kittyd
      it has been a long time since i saw i site based entirely on one table.... (the .net one)
      as much nostalgic as it gets, i believe you should be better off with a CMS. and with those, it is much easier to customise the design... you start with a template/theme that is more close to what you like (structure, basic color scheme, how manu works, page layout) and just customise the essential imager and maybe a little css, but not always necesary

      and i agree with the ones above, the .com looks nicer/sleeker/web2.0er than .net
      best luck!
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      • Profile picture of the author birneyj
        Thanks for all of the replies, Greatly appreciated.
        Does anyone have an opinion as to if google will penalize the site if I switch to a CMS. The reason for the questions above about switching to wordpress is that I have approx. 150 articles that I want to add to the site over the next few weeks.

        With either the .com or the .net, it will be hard to add that many articles and make it ez for the search engines or the readers to actually find the content that they are looking for.

        Just a little concerned about losing position in SE's.

        Thanks
        Jim
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  • Profile picture of the author kittyd
    i don`t believe google will mind that you switch to wordpress, google kinda loves wp alot, and if you add articles daily (until you run out of them, at least) he will love your site even more...
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