Hello, Sitting In Seattle ~
I took a look at your site with an eye toward your request for
"feedback for overall appearance and wording" and for help with meta
tags and to make the site "search engine friendly".
1. Overall Appearance:
A glance at your site's "overall appearance" shows that it's pleasant
looking and fairly easy to read, in that it has a light background
which is not overpowering, and the text is within a viewer's "comfort
zone", that is, not too wide that it makes following the text hard to
read (and therefore, hard to comprehend).
But there are a few problems with the text, too. You are using the
Arial or a comparable sans-serif font, but you have justified the
text. Not all browsers, including IE, handle letterspacing within a
word and word spacing for justified text the same. That, together with
default system and browser settings, can produce some rather ugly gaps
between words and make it very difficult to read. Justified text is
fine for print copy with a printer and word processor that handles
letterspacing and word spacing so there aren't those gaps.
For Web copy, you should just use a left justified text and let the
browser handle text in the best manner it can. There are very few
instances where justified text would look good across all browsers,
monitor sizes and settings and system defaults, and this isn't one of
them.
Type faces: It's unclear why you changed the type face in the title -
"What you don't know YouNeverKnow.com" - from Arial to Comic Sans ...
but for those who don't have comic sans. The immediate impression is
that you made a mistake, followed by "did you mean to do that" ... and
for those who haven't installed the comic sans font, it looks like a
very big sans-serif (default) and like a mistake. You might want to
rethink that.
Remember, not everyone sees what you are seeing when you design a
site. Website designers usually have at least half a dozen different
browsers set at different resolutions and with different font defaults
to get a good idea of what others may see when they design a site.
2. What's this site about?
Your site loads fast, which is good, and there is something showing in
a fast enough time so as not to lose visitors who are forced to wait
forever for a page to load.
Above the fold - (that is, the first screenful), this site seems to be
about information ... indeed, your text says, "What you know. What
you may not know. What you should know."
And then we scroll down, it seems as if this site is about selling a
teeshirt with international symbols.
This could be seen as misleading and really irritate some visitors. If
this site is about selling your teeshirt, then get the teeshirt up
there in the first screen and leave absolutely NO DOUBT in your
visitor's mind about that fact. Don't waste your visitor's time if
he's coming there looking for information, and you are selling
teeshirts. A bazillion visitors won't do you any good if they're not
coming there looking for your teeshirts. If they're coming there for
information about things they never knew (as in factoids) and you're
peddlng teeshirts, they are not going to be happy campers, and the
chances are that even if they were hooked by the teeshirt, they aren't
going to buy it now.
3. Comfort and credibility -
Consumer Web Watch published a research report on credibility on the
Web dated October 29, 2002, with a follow-up dated November 11, 2002.
The consumer-driven study, entitled "How Do People Evaluate a Web
Site's Credibility? Results from a Large Study", was part of Stanford
University Persuasive Technology Lab's investigation on what causes
people to believe — or not believe — what they find online.
In its abstract and discussion of the study, they stated, "As the Web
becomes a part of people's everyday lives ... there is a growing need
to help people figure out whether a Web site is credible or not: Can I
trust the information on this site? Can I trust in the services this
site describes?"
In the study's findings, data showed that the average consumer paid
far more attention to the superficial aspects of a site, such as
visual cues, than to its content. Nearly half of all consumers (or
6.1%) in the study assessed the credibility of sites based in part on
the appeal of the overall visual design of a site, including layout,
typography, font size and color schemes.
The five most important credibility assessments ...
The Stanford study revealed that the five most important credibility
assessments were:
- Identity,
- Advertising and Sponsorships,
- Customer Service,
- Corrections, and
- Privacy.
The study information is at
- http://www.consumerwebwatch.org/news/report3_credibilityresearch/stanfordPTL_abstract.htm
Your "About YNK" page, which one usually associates with information
about who we are doing business with and contact information, Instead,
yours tells about how the traveling tee came into being. That
information is not only interesting, but can be a useful selling tool,
but would be better relegated to information about the teeshirt.
Your visitor expects your "About YNK" to contain information about the
company behind the purchase, with addresses, contact information and
if you want to create credibility and make it easier to do business
with you, some information about the people behind YNK.
You do have a useful and informative Privacy page, but it is difficult
to find your guarantee. A link to your guarantee and explanation of
that (Customer Service) from every page on the site would be helpful
to your visitor.
4. HTML and coding -
I see that this is constructed using Front Page, which throws in a LOT
of extraneous code and rarely validates for cross-browser
compatibility.
In addition, there is no doctype declaration. Without a doctype
declaration, visitors to your pages see them according to the doctype
in the last site they visited. A lack of a doctype declaration,
combined with front page as the page editor, can produce some rather
alarming results - and certainly not what you intended for your site's
visitors.
Information on doctype declarations can be found on the Web Design
Group's information page on doctype declarations, including why you
should use it, can be found here:
- http://www.htmlhelp.com/tools/validator/doctype.html
Alt tags - Your graphics do not include alt tags. For accessibility
purposes alone, it would seem you'd want to use alt tags, but there
are other uses for them as well, including HELPING with search engine
placement. The few instances when you wouldn't use one might be if you
have sliced an image and assembled it within a table, in which case
you would use a summary of the table and empty alt tags to help with
the accessibility issues.
For a full explanation of why you should, and how to, make your
Website accessible, you might want to look at the W3C standards
information page, "Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0", which
can be found here:
- http://www.w3.org/TR/WAI-WEBCONTENT/
5. Search Engine Friendly
After you have worked on the matters above and you are ready to submit
the site to search engines, you may want to look at what the experts
advise on search engine submission and making it search engine
friendly.
One of the most acknowledged and respected information sites on search
engines is Danny Sullivan's Search Engine Watch.
- http://searchenginewatch.com/
There is an entire section devoted to design, keywords, meta tags and
content in the site's "Search Engine Submission Tips", which is
located here:
- http://searchenginewatch.com/webmasters/index.html
I think this may help with your questions on search engine submission.
6. Google's recommendations
I imagine you may be wondering why I talked earlier about making your
site user friendly, the credibility issues, coding, alt tags, etc., in
relation to making your site search engine friendly.
I direct your attention to "Google Information for Webmasters"
- ://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html
Please notice the information under "Design and Content Guidelines"
"Create a useful, information-rich site and write pages that clearly
and accurately describe your content."
So far as keywords and metatags,
"Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make
sure that your site actually includes those words within it."
And lastly, Google's first recommendation under "Quality Guidelines -
Basic principles"
"Make pages for users, not for search engines. Don't deceive your
users, or present different content to search engines than you display
to users."
** More information on user friendliness:
There is a lot of information on the Internet about user friendliness,
but none so well-known as Jakob Nielsen's site, useit.com.
- http://www.useit.com/
There is a wealth of information there, whether or not you agree with
it all, the basics remain the same about the use of typefaces, widths,
and how to design a good, basic site. I suspect there will be some
information there that will make a lot of sense to you, that extra
"something" that will make the difference, once you read it.
Nielsen discusses and links to studies for the issues I have discussed
above, includingi accessibility, usability, friendliness, etc. Please
know that I am a web designer and do not necessarily agree with
everything Nielsen says. I think a few things are downright outdated.
But so far as the basics and the information above, that still hasn't
changed.
** Search words for your site
Once you have made those changes to make your site strong, then you
can determine your market (which would obviously include travelers),
and work on the search terms they would look for as they're preparing
a trip. Certainly this would be as useful for international markets as
it would be for the domestic market, and your search terms - as well
as your content - should include those terms. This will go a long way
toward helping make your site "search engine friendly" as well.
Search terms used -
- user friendly guidelines
- search engine friendly guidelines
- accessibility
- front page problems
I hope this helps, and good luck! I like the idea of your teeshirt.
Yours ever so,
Serenata |
