Web Site Review check it out.

[sheepdog 10]

Ok, I am almost afraid to do this, after reading some of the web site reviews, but I guess I should really want the truth eh? Thing is, I actually like my site pretty much the way it is, but if there can be improvements, I should certainly consider them. There are a lot of things I would like to ad as I have time, for example not actual breed descriptions since you can find those in a million places on the internet, but some more personal insights to the different breeds, why I like them, why/how I got a start in that breed, etc. And I do want to eventually learn to do video and add clips of the pups playing but right now that's way over my head technically. So, if you don't mind, take a look around my site. Link is below in my signature. How is the site for ease of navigation? Is it easy to find what you want? Graphics look ok? Everything easy to read and understand? What improvements do you think I should make?

[truefusion 3]

From a design perspective there are many things that can use some work. I will try to divide them up as i get into them.

 

First Impressions

 

Upon entering the site, i got the impression that the goal of the website wasn't necessarily to attract a wide range of users. That is, it seems more of a local attraction, perhaps around your area, where you live. And unless i took the time to read what the website was about, the site can be perceived more of a fan site about dogs rather than a business itself (as the website was more "cute" than "professional"). It also didn't look much like a website that was hand-coded—looking at the source code somewhat verifies this. I took the time to read some of the text to get an idea of what the website is about (but there should be something that gets the point across quicker). Once i got passed the scrolling marquee, i could pretty much anticipate what was coming next: a long introduction. Without reading it, i can see that it is pretty long, therefore i chose not to dive into it—this is to be expected from many other visitors and such an introduction may be better left for an "About Us" page.

 

Navigation

 

After skipping the introduction, naturally i sought after more interesting places from the website. However, the navigation, while it may be considered cute, wasn't as readable as i expected it to be. The text is slightly blurry on many of them and the animals sometimes get in the way of the text. Also, although i am using a 1280x1024 screen resolution, without scrolling i can only see the first three navigational buttons. Some of the navigational buttons, though, (i.e. after scrolling) only had initials for the text; "FAQ" and "V.I.P." are socially obvious (though entering V.I.P. had "page" for the P), so those names don't necessarily matter. I was expecting to see a button concerning what kind of dog services you offer, but i didn't find one. Having skipped the introduction on the home page, if it said anything about the services you provide, i would have missed it.

 

Site Structure/Design

 

The site seems a bit cluttered to me; things could be better spaced out. The scrolling marquee has text that can be observed before the marquee, and some of its text is better off in the title of the website as a subtitle—in other words, the scrolling marquee is unnecessary. Some of the colors and fonts used for the site don't appear to be consistent or match with each other. For example, the red and blue text; the pink background and the rainbow-colored text; some pages have bigger/bolder/different fonts than others. I noticed some pages can be merged or become children of another page/category. For example, the "Just My Humble Opinion" page and the FAQs page can go under "General Information." You also have your e-mail in a lot of places, including the navigation. You should consider resorting to a simple "Contact Us" page. You may also want to consider making a "Services" page that gets into more thoroughly what kind of services you offer.

 

The home page is generally used as a way to provide a brief glimpse of the website and what users are to expect. Therefore you could briefly emphasize the services you provide, perhaps some "Up to" prices on the kind of dogs you sell, and other information that one can find on your site. The home page acts kind of like a motivator to get the user to browse your website. Of course, one shouldn't go crazy with their home page, attempting to fit everything about their site. The home page should include what you want the user to know about more than other information on the site, not the entire website.

 

Your website seems to consist of only static pages. You can reduce the work required to update your website if you switch to a more dynamic way of doing things. That is, if you don't already have one, use a simple, content management system that has its own template system. Personally, i would suggest a complete site remake. A complete site remake should help make your website more standards compliant too. Of course, you don't have to consider anything that has been mentioned, as this information deals mostly with advertising through your website—your website may not be your preferred way of advertising your business. But it may still be useful for spreading information more effectively.

[Nameless_ 1]

Well... for me... (I won't go into as much detail as truefusion as he probably has more background knowledge than me and know more about me, but I will put in my two cents worth and tell you what I think about it, so you can put my opinion(s) in the bucket too).You site is well... a bit too plain on the graphics bit, and a bit too sharp in the choice of colour. I think it would be best if you had a good looking banner that looks professional up the top of your site, and maybe also down the left hand side where the navigational links are. It is hard to attract customers and clients if your site doesn't look professional, and I must say (I hope you don't get offended) that it is clearly not a site that is done by a professional website designer, and that looks like one of those home made ones...I suggest you to take our your background and replace it with a solid colour, like plain white or something like that... if you want, you CAN use that background, but you might want to put a thing in the middle instead and have a solid background and colour there. If this is the case, then the navigational links will have to be under the banner and the picture instead, and the sides will be completely empty apart from the background. It's a bit complicated trying to describe it to you, but I hope you understand what I'm talking about.If possible, try to get more professional looking pictures of your dogs, maybe cute fluffy puppy ones to entice the "Awwwww.... that puppy's so cute!" mode in your customer. That's what you'll want to try and aim for!First impressions are important, and your customer, if they found you and your company (if you have one) through your site first, then that is what they will think about it, their first impressions. So if you want your customer(s) to think you look professional, and I'm sure you are, then work on making your site look professional.But anyway... GOOD WORK!!! At least you have a website of your own... ;)Hope my criticism didn't turn you off... it's meant to be positive and done in the hope that you will have a better and more improved site that will get you more customers...Cheers

[rob86 2]

I took a look at your webpage and I had a few impressions of it as a general user (and not a Web design Guru like Truefusion ) . The scrolling marquee was the first thing I saw, and it seems out of place and obtrusive, especially because it has a white background on an image background. The words above the logo image seem to not belong there because I thnk that your logo banner should be the focal point of the top area, and "Welcome to Dogs and Puppies For Sale" sounds like bad English which is a bad first impression of someone you want to do business with. The logo itself, I think could be very, very greatly enhanced by adding a black "drop shadow" around the letters and the dogs. They look like they were copy and pasted on there together, which of course, it what was done but a little shadow around it will make it look very professional. It's a simple little tweak to your logo that in my humble opinion would make it look 100x better.This is just my opinion, but I think the font you chose looks too, I don't know the word, too straight, too formal for your particular webpage. You've got soft pink colours, cute dogs, and I think you need a "cuter" font, maybe comic sans ms, or even Arial is a little less unappealing to my eyes. Another thing I noticed that in one of your selections you got very political, and in this world it's very easy to offend someone. I don't think your place of business should be the place for stuff like that (in the humble opinion section). I could definitely see someone all set to get a pup from you, just to stumble on your opinion page and be offended. If you don't care about offending someone and don't want to do business with someone who is offended by it anyway, that's up to you!The page seems to be aligned to the left too, which leaves a big blank space on the right of every page. I just noticed on my way out that your site logo changes. I guess this doesn't necessarily have to be a bad thing, but the image on "Faq.htm' doesn't work, for obvious reasons. The word Kennel seems to be in particular, disappearing into the background. I want to add that I think that your business webpage is a representation of your kennel, as such, I think how professional it looks depends on how professional you want the business to seem. For example, if it looks too fancy with fancy 3d menus and stuff, I would get the impression that pup4u is a big corporation raising unhealthy puppies for profit, which would be bad. As it stands, the webpage could stand to use some touching up to look more professional and organized (the layouts change drastically, sometimes the logos are different and the words appear in different places), but there's no need to go overboard with the professionalism. You don't have to make it look like microsoft.com or something for example. I do have good news amidst all this negative reviewing, if I were looking for another dog, your website would really make me want to get a dog from you. I get the impression you're a very professional breeder and more importantly a person who cares about the animals. This to me is the most important part of the site and you succeeded there. It reminded me of when I was looking for a dog breeder years ago and all of the information and concern you put into raising your pups and caring for them long after they're gone was very impressive. I checked out maybe half a dozen breeders and none of them compared to the professionalism and general feeling of a good breeder I got from checking out your site. I remember feeling frustration because I never knew if I could trust a particular breeder, but with all of the information on your site, it makes you seem very nice and trustworthy. So all in all, it's not a bad website. The effort you put into it shows through all the information but the layout should be re designed and organized a bit to keep the same general appearance between pages. You could learn the basics (how to manipulate font colors and backgrounds) of CSS at w3schools.com and make a style sheet that would be the style you could re-use through all of your present and future pages. It's really quite easy as I'm learning myself.Or you could do what Truefusion says, but I have no experience with that myself..

Edited August 18, 2009 by rob86 (see edit history)

[rob86 2]

Here's an example of what I mean about shadowing the logo. I know this looks like it's been chopped up and messy, but it was just a quick job to show the effect of having a shadow. It's a lot easier to do from scratch than try to draw around all those dogs lol. I think it would make it look good (if you did a better editing job than I did)

[kleong 0]

When I first look at the website, I gave me the impression that it is from the past. Repeated background images with a simple looking ticker on the top. Coupled with big icons and a "plastered" logo, that makes the whole thing look so ancient. I think you will go well if you could re-arrangement the layout of the content. Everything is in a mess at the moment.

[Nameless_ 1]

Here's an example of what I mean about shadowing the logo. I know this looks like it's been chopped up and messy, but it was just a quick job to show the effect of having a shadow. It's a lot easier to do from scratch than try to draw around all those dogs lol. I think it would make it look good (if you did a better editing job than I did)

Oooh... Nice job. Glad you actually took the effort to show what you mean.
It might actually be better if sheepdog had photoshop and did a template of how he wants his site to look like. Then all the web coding gurus can then help him achieve the effects that he wants in his website.

[sheepdog 10]

I would really like to thank everyone for taking the time and giving my web site a good going over. I do appreciate all your input. I am really grateful you gave it such a thorough look over too. This past week or so I have been doing some searching for a particular dog to add to my breeding program, and while I was at that, I made it a point to take a good look at other dog breeder web sites. Have to say, after looking at a lot of others, mine isn?t so bad really. So many I looked at had virtually no information, or if they did it was hard to find just what I was looking for. Some were down right confusing. Even so, I do see that I have a lot of fine tuning to do on my site, and all your comments will certainly help me do that. I just need more clarification on some points. And maybe more discussion on my attempt to achieve that just right balance. It?s difficult to find the line between professional and ?cute? enough to be appealing to prospective customers. Truefusion, thanks so much, you really delved deeply into my site. I am not really sure how to make it look more like a puppy sale site and not a dog fan club, it does have pups for sale right at the top, so I?m not sure what to do about that. And also by ?hand coding? I assume you mean html coding? Quite right, I used Front Page to make the site. I know only the faintest bit about html coding. I could never do the page completely that way. I have enough trouble with FP. I still have a lot of trouble getting things placed on the site where I want them to go. And I also noticed when I look at my site from my sister in laws wide screen computer, it was all funky looking, the pages had lots of blank space on the right side of the screen (just the background was there) but all the text was aligned to the left, and I haven?t a clue as to how to deal with making the site look right for the variety of different monitors the site is viewed from. That?s all way over my head. I can however, play around with my navigation buttons to see if I can come up with some where the dog picture doesn?t conflict so much with the lettering. That might be a good project for the upcoming cold winter days that I find myself spending more time doing things like working on my site. I think you may be right, I have a bit too much on the main page. My limited experience in this department made me think I needed more info on the first page, due to getting the key words on the main page to help in the search engines finding and ranking my page. Will I get as good search engine results from text on subsequent pages as I would if they were on the main page? Also, I figured the more places I had an email link, the easier it would be to contact me. If they can contact me from any page, they don?t have to go back looking for a contact us type page, or at least that was my thinking on that subject. I also broke up the pages more since I did have a lot of content, and I didn?t want the pages to load too slowly. I am not at all sure of what a content management system is, or what it means to be more standards compliant. You are over my head there. As is pretty easy to do in my case. Nameless I think, especially after seeing Rob86?s remake of my top banner graphic, you are absolutely right, it looked flat as a pancake. I have already replace it with a new banner I recently worked up to put on another site for a link back to my site. It may not be perfect, but at least is some improvement. The consensus seemed to be to loose the marquee, so it?s history now too.Rob86 Wow, I had no idea how bad my main graphic looked until I saw what you did with it, Thanks so much for taking the time to make the illustration to demonstrate your point. It certainly made it easier to understand and got the point across loud and clear. Now, if I was a really brilliant graphics designer, I?d make this cute little puppy that jumps and chases a ball, or maybe does some tricks, down the right side of my main page, jumping down as a visitor scrolled down on the page. (you know, sort of like those text things some sites have that make strings of text when you move your mouse pointer, and yes, those can be annoying) since I have all that space over there I can?t get balanced out, lol. I?m just not that good. I also worry about graphics overload, especially on the main page, making it load too slowly, which is another good way to get people to leave your site without looking it over. Right now I am using an old obsolete program, Microsoft Photo Draw to make my graphics. It took me a long time to figure out how to use it, and it is a good program for simply dressing up my puppy pictures, but it doesn?t make the fancy graphics so many web sites are now using. I?m not sure I have the talents to get into much more complicated graphics, for me, new programs are extremely difficult to figure out how to use. And I have a limited amount of time to spend studying, the dogs take up most of my time, not leaving a lot of time for other things. I have been around and around the font type to use. I originally had a different one, as you say, cuter, (I forget now which one) but did have some complaints about it being too hard to read, so I went back to a more basic font. I still use some different ones for the titles on the individual puppy pages, Algerian I think, but since in some cases, like for my health guarantee and information on what to do for you pup, it needs to be easy on the eyes to encourage visitors to actually read it. Now, I had to think long and hard about adding the political stuff. And you are probably right, I do understand how some could be offended, but after giving it much consideration, I decide that it might actually be a good way to ?cull? troublesome people. The type of people that would be offended by the stuff on my Just My Humble Opinion page are the same type of people who would not buy a dog anyway, they would be the ones that would be the type to ?adopt? a mangy rescue mutt for that touchy feely (aka, Whinny *bottom* Liberal) good socially correct status. In all honesty, I have had to slap my hands away from making it a lot worse than it already is. I don?t have a politically correct bone in my body. Thanks for understanding about how difficult to achieve that just right balance between professional and a site that instills confidence in the buyer without looking cold and sterile. It sure isn?t easy to do. Kleong, ancient, LOL, I didn?t think the internet had been around long enough for anything to be ancient yet! But your right, it rather is a mess. A lot of that is that I simply have a really hard time getting Front Page to do what I want it to do. I?ve had this problem from the first moment I sat down in front of a computer. While most things computer oriented are simple once you know the routine, if there isn?t anyone there to tell you to click here, do this and then do that, it?s pretty hard to figure out how to do it when you have to just guess at what you are doing. Thanks again to all that offered tips and ideas.

[fermin25 3]

Oh lovely site...but I think you maybe have to understand some things before take the adventure of making a business site because I see that you are selling puppies and maybe you forgot that in a business is very important the design and your site look like a personal site like designed with the pure html in the wordpad but the background it is ok is the best part of the ste and I have to say that the text is good, I mean the text but the location of the text is no good. You maybe have to add a menu to your site and start to use PHP instead of HTML. Learn Php is very difficult I am learning and until this day I don?t know everything but you can get experience in some months or maybe if you have a lot of free time in some weeks...But how all the people want the fast way I recommend you to use the WYSIWYG software that literally make your website like a Word document, you will can add all the content you want to the page and the program will start to generate the HTML code and you can design a professional website without having any knowledge about the HTML or PHP codes. So your site is very good... if it is your first site of course but you need to add a lot of things that maybe will can give you the possibility to make more money and sell more puppies and get more traffic, it is mean more visitors like a professional website. I recommend you to use the WYSIWYG software and you can put the word WYSIWYG in google and in softonic maybe there are tens of sofware that will hep you to get a more professional site.Please don?t take my review like a personal attack. I want only to help you and my recomendations are based in the same problems I had when I was more "younger" here in the internet and web design world. And for last, I want to congratulate you because you take the more difficult step that is make your own website and that is very good, and I am sure that your website have helped to a lot of people and It will continue helping a lot of more time.This is my review if you have a question please send me a pm. Bye.

[inverse_bloom 0]

I kinda agree with kleong, my very first impression of the site was it reminded of the genre of sites made in the period 95 - 98. I'm not necessarily saying that is a bad thing, but without a doubt it has that aesthetic quality about it. One simple change that i think would benefit your site would be to have some recently dated news on the main page, like the major happenings for 2009. My justification behind this suggestion is people will probably have the same impression as myself and you need to reinforce that your business is current and going strong.

 

I recommend center aligning all text on the large main column. It will look much more professional with minimal effort . Also with your shortcut cloud at the bottom, it would be preferable to include 3 shortcuts per a line where there are 2.

 

Regarding search engine optimization, it's very difficult to determine what result you would get by cutting a few paragraphs out of your homepage and placing those on better fitting pages. But the advantage of doing it is people who do find your site will be more likely to spend more time reading it, as it is better designed.

 

Your meta tags are decently utilized. I dont know if you aware of it, but there are some google tools that allow you more insight as to what keywords and phrases are mostly being entered in search engines at the moment.

 

Here is a link - https://www.google.com/trends/#

 

Just type in "dog breeders" in the top field and enjoy!

Edited October 28, 2009 by inverse_bloom (see edit history)