Website Design and Features Advice

Baddass

Baddass

Baddass

Man of Honour
Joined
12 Jan 2003
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Hi guys,

Just looking for some feedback, ideas and thoughts really about my website which I'm looking to expand and improve. http://www.tftcentral.co.uk/


CMS - At the moment the site is just written in HTML. Some people have recommended content management systems, but i'm not sure if these would help me? Would they be of benefit? I can add the following easily via my hosting, so are any of these any good? ( Drupal, Geeklog, Joomla, Mambo Open Source, PHP-Nuke, phpWCMS, phpWebSite, Post-Nuke, Siteframe, TYPO3, Xoops)


Advertising - I've been playing with google adds recently. I don't want to cover the site with ads, but any tips on positioning and optimising these would be appreciated. How much $ do people tend to make from theirs?

Search engines - any tips on how to optimise for search engines?

Improving hits and visits - any advice on how to do so?

Feedback and advise appreciated :) thanks
 
first off all, your site it really nice - its gorgeous in fact!

as for getting your site in search engines...

dont over look META tags doesn't look like you have them on there at the mo, i kept reading that google doesnt read meta tags, they clearly do. i added them to my site and it was in google a few days later.

you can speed up the process of getting it into the msn search page by filling in this form

http://beta.search.msn.co.uk/docs/submit.aspx

once its in one crawlers usually do the rest


get on yahoo here

http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html


getting more hits can be tricky. sign up to loads of related forums and having it in your sig would be once way, if they allowed that type of thing.

another way is to pay for key word ads on google so it comes up a the top of the page when people search for TFT etc.

more info here
https://adwords.google.com/select/L...n-ha-aw&medium=ha&term=google sponsored links

you can set a budget which is good. ive used this method before and it works really well.

sorry if this is all obvious to you, im just trying to pass on my experience :p


last thing. i hate to see contact buttons that have mailto: code in them.

not that many people use outlook and its always a pain when you click a button and outlook appears. as well as that people who arent that computer savvy will try to use it to send emails and not understand why its not working. i get this a lot at work :p

a php/asp contact form would be better or even a linking to a page that has your contact details on it



if you do want a contact form where people can fill in fields/choose options from drop down boxes etc and then click submit for example, that is something i can help you with very easily.

by the looks of your site though im sure thats something you could do very easily as well but the offer is there:)
 
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It's worth getting onto Google Analytics to learn more about where your visitors come from, and perhaps knock up a Google Sitemap to make indexing easier/more thorough.

As for advertising, it may be worth picking up some ads from one of the affilate networks out there (like TradeDoubler, AffiliateFuture, AffiliateWindow, etc.) as some of the banner ads can look a bit more friendly and professional than the Google based ones, you can pick and choose which ones you want, and you can have as many or as few as you like. More info on Affiliate based advertising at the Affiliate Marketing Forums.

Quantity (and quality) of links from other sites are key when it comes to search engine placement though, so the more links you can get to your site the better.
 
voodooflux said:
It's worth getting onto Google Analytics to learn more about where your visitors come from, and perhaps knock up a Google Sitemap to make indexing easier/more thorough.

As for advertising, it may be worth picking up some ads from one of the affilate networks out there (like TradeDoubler, AffiliateFuture, AffiliateWindow, etc.) as some of the banner ads can look a bit more friendly and professional than the Google based ones, you can pick and choose which ones you want, and you can have as many or as few as you like. More info on Affiliate based advertising at the Affiliate Marketing Forums.

Quantity (and quality) of links from other sites are key when it comes to search engine placement though, so the more links you can get to your site the better.
Click to expand...

thanks for the advice there. I've got google analytics so that is handy to get an idea of who is viewing what, and where from. Will check out the ad links you've mentioned to me too, thanks :)
 
Nice/handy site, just a couple of tips to help with SE listings. (these aren't criticisms btw and you probably already use some of them)

I'd could say convert the entire site to CSS but I've never seen an instance where it's affected its search engine placement.

Use meaningful descriptions on your pages.

Use a styled list for your menu. (there's some good examples of them here: http://www.dynamicdrive.com/style/)

If you end up using a CMS app. to manage the site, either get one that creates meaningful URLS and not something like "index.php?page=whatever", normally there are hacks available for search engine friendly URL's

H1 and H2 tags are your friends for headers/sub headers etc

If you do use meta content/keywords try and keep them relevant to the content actually in the page.

Most importantly for Google placement I've found are links back to your site, get as many as you can without spamming

Do a google sitemap here: http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ upload it and reference it in your Google sitemaps acct.

These are a few things I use doing my sites, I average between 4 and 5 site's a month and haven't gone wrong with placement yet.
 
thanks for the feedback Cuchulain, very handy :)

Cuchulain said:
Use meaningful descriptions on your pages.
Click to expand...

do you mean as the page title for each page? I was thinking of changing them all since at the mo they all start with "TFT Central - then the title of the article / review". Would changing to the review title alone help?

Use a styled list for your menu. (there's some good examples of them here: http://www.dynamicdrive.com/style/)
Click to expand...

will take a look, will it help anything other than aesthetics?

If you end up using a CMS app. to manage the site, either get one that creates meaningful URLS and not something like "index.php?page=whatever", normally there are hacks available for search engine friendly URL's
Click to expand...

ok, cool, nice one

H1 and H2 tags are your friends for headers/sub headers etc
Click to expand...

can you elaborate for me?

If you do use meta content/keywords try and keep them relevant to the content actually in the page.
Click to expand...

will do, might add meta tags to each page then individually?

Do a google sitemap here: http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ upload it and reference it in your Google sitemaps acct.
Click to expand...

will do, looking into sitemaps now
 
Cuchulain said:
H1 and H2 tags are your friends for headers/sub headers etc
Click to expand...

Good advice. Rather than just specifying a point size and font weight for any header text, use explicit H1, H2, etc. tags, with appropriate CSS attributes to change their appearence. This emphasises the importance of the header content to a search engine.
 
i've created a google site map here: http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ and uploaded it and activated via google webmaster tools. Do i need to update the sitemap file (ie re-create it) at all or often?

edit: and does it matter that site only lists the first 500 URL's?
 
Never ever use tables for layout and your completely ignoring the HTML standards.

Get it up to XHTML 1.0 at least. Use div and span for layout along with CSS.

I work as a web programmer and its very annoying when people use tables for layout.
 
Rich43 said:
Never ever use tables for layout and your completely ignoring the HTML standards.

Get it up to XHTML 1.0 at least. Use div and span for layout along with CSS.

I work as a web programmer and its very annoying when people use tables for layout.
Click to expand...

ok fair enough. This was one of my reasons for maybe switching to a CMS. I'm by no means an expert web designer hence the use of tables....it kind of does the job though, is there a problem with not being up to XHTML 1.0?
 
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