Different Colour Productions

Hi,

I am running a website design and development company and I am planning on re-designing my website over the next few weeks. I am planning on adding more information, articles, business resources, free downloads, mini blog. Any other suggestion for addtional content would help alot. Gernerally I am trying to find out what are the problems people encounter when looking at my website so I can fix these issues on the next development cycle.

I look forward to your replies,

regards

P Shah - www.dcpweb.co.uk

I took a very brief look at your site, and it looks great! Everything stands out, the colours are balanced, etc. In my honest opinion, you don't need to add any of those bells and whistles to make your site too much better.


Problems I have with your current site: NONE!

i love the colors of your site, the banner is awsome, the only thing i cna see wrong is that your flash banner is so big it makes it so that people have to scroll way down the page before reaching content. and in my opinion its anoying, but other than that, its awsome.

Things wrong with your site - TABLES! and 6 validation errors!

Get the errors fixed, most of them are just because you've used & instead of &.

And learn to handcode, get out of using tables and use CSS instead to style your site. You should seperate style(css) and content(xhtml).

The site looks nice but the code should be sorted as above.

Good luck!

Taking a peak at the site. Visually it's very nice. Too bad you haven't hand coded it. With all that inline css you are killing yourself SEO wise. It's a long way down the page before I get to any real content.

Your H1 is criminal!!!! I can't believe Google has allowed that. Just a warning flag there... I'd be careful of that. Diego may have more accurate info on this than I do.

The information is quite easy to sort through but in my opinion the site looks a bit like a template.

I do like your portfolio being broken up into pages, increasing the number of pages your site has.

Having the flash reload on every page is quite annoying in my opinion. I've seen it on many many sites so you are not alone and again this is probably just my opinion.

Overall the site is designed well. I wish it had a bit less of the template look... but with the number of clients you have, it seems the site is working for you.

I'd say your #1 priority would be hand coding with tableless code as well as SEO.
Hope this helps!

The Google spider is a much faster reader than you are, Linda, and robotically patient. I would expect inline css to have no effect on SEO.

But the inline CSS should still go. It's just an inefficient coding practice.

Well I know for a fact that I bumped up a spot or two with most keyword phrases after switching my personal site from tables/inline css to div's and external css just a couple of months ago.
I watched it happen.
That jump was made prior to tweaking my SEO techniques via the suggestions made in this critique forum.

I think you should test it for yourself Mike.

Since I never use inline CSS, there's little motivation.

Anecdotal evidence is not evidence, and correlation is not cause -- nothing personal, just two epistemic principles I believe in (and with good reason). And another one: experiments with small sample sizes are useless (except if followed by ones with big sample sizes).

But for this example, it hardly matters. Weaning oneself off inline styles is a Good Idea anyway.

Mike, I agree with Linda. Inline CSS can have an affect in SEO. Why do you think liquid layouts (CSS) are important and better than tables in SEO? Because they use less code. You are oh so wrong in assuming the Google spider is patient.

1. SE spiders will stop crawling a website (and come back some other time to finish the job) if...
- spider can't parse content (ie.: code errors)
- pages take long to load
- pages are too big

2. Keyword density is absolutely everything. SEs consider text/code ratios, link/text ratios, keyword density and keyword prominence in every individual 'chunk' of a page/website: phrases, paragraphs, divs/cells, body, head, the entire page, the local neighbourhood (ie.: all pages within in folder) and the website as a whole. Having inline CSS increases the size of your page, thus diminishing the density of your keywords.
- more code = less keyword density
- less code = more keyword density
- minimal code = optimum keyword density

As for the review of this website, you MUST hand-code your next version. There are so many obvious errors, I can only assume it's the result of the poor use of a WYSIWYG editor. As Linda mentioned, your H1 tags (which just happens to be the most important tag on any page is abused and misused.

The design and appearance is great, the code is poor............

I don't think CSS layouts are better for SEO. And, while the Google spider might give up after a huge amount of code (Google won't devote infinite resources to crawling a web page), that limit should never be reached except for the most extreme cases (when file size becomes a problem). Google has no motive to index a site badly.

As usual with SEO, you've made a whole lot of claims with no evidence.

The next step in the discussion involves your claiming that you've "seen it happen so many times", and my ignoring your claim because it's anecdotal evidence (that is, not evidence).

Like I said - and I'll say it again - SEs analyze every aspect of a page from different angles, one of which is the keyword density of an entire page and it's readble-text/code and keywords/code ratio.
Less code = more prominent keywords

You can be as ignorant as you like, it doesn't bother me. I have a track record in SEO that proves this concept, I just won't waste the time preaching to you... you're entitled to your opinion so let's just agree to disagree!

Spooky! I must be psychic to make such uncanny predictions:


Yes, I think we had better do that. Thanks for the entitlement, I don't know what I would have done without it.

I only mentioned my results because you said that! LOL They are merely the reason I personally agree with this concept, not in any way a reason for you to do so...

Any way, it seems you are disagreeing with me just for the sake of an argument. You haven't actually provided a counter argument so let's just leave it as it is. The readers will make up their minds for themselves - with or without my biased evidence

True.



False.



True.

Where is your evidence, Mike. I've recently had this code:content discussion with you and stand by my previous comments. I wholeheartedly agree with Diego on this and you cannot proclaim to have any more knowledge than either of us as no-one actually knows how SE's work, except for the people who work for them. Its all guesswork.

As goes the site, it looks great but you're relying on flash for your navigation which I would never do in a million years and there are other code issues that need looking at too.

Great design though.

Pete.

Lovely design. A touch annoying the flash repeats when moving to a new page. Don't like those 'bulky' navigation icons.

Aside from that its pretty tasty.

I'm only going to say this once, because I weary of the argument. Yes, I know it's my own fault for challenging the orthodoxy. I shall not dispute such SEO topics again (<meta> keywords, for example).

There are two reasons that my opinion is more rational than yours:

1. I have an argument to support it, consisting of plausible deductions.
2. For any proposition P, such that there is no empirical evidence that P, it is (ceteris paribus) irrational to believe P and rational to believe not-P (Occam's Razor; atheism is justified against agnosticism).

And no, you can't apply Occam's razor to the negation of your proposition (turning the epistemic tables on me), because:

1. You need ceteris paribus, and you don't have it.
2. We're not arguing about a bivalent state, so you don't get meaningful negation: there are lots of possible search engine rules, and you've singled out one. It's not a 50/50 chance.

My argument: Google wants to index web content as accurately as possible. The resources required to run the spider through a web page, unless it's obscenely huge, are trivial. Therefore Google will not cause the spider to abort indexing a code-bloated page. Furthermore Google has no reason to care about the quality of a page's coding, because this is orthogonal to the quality/relevance of the page's content; and therefore Google will not bias its rankings towards valid or elegant (minimal markup) code.

My conclusion: for SEO it doesn't matter how bloated your code is. Even invalid code is unlikely to affect Google rankings, unless it's so badly broken that the spider can't follow links or find textual content.

So I think it comes down to my argument against your anecdotal evidence, or faith in received opinions of some (not all, and perhaps not even the majority of) search engine optimisation "experts".

I prefer my argument. You don't. Big deal.

LOL. You know somebody's mad when they let out their "Occam's Razor" on ya!

Again, you're being stubborn and you haven't addressed the key-point in my argument: keyword/code ratio. I'm not saying that SEs won't index your site because your pages are too big, what I'm saying is that SEs calculate the relevance of a phrase by working out how important it is within the code (amongst other things), ie.: how soon and how often it appears.

Code: Select all

Even invalid code is unlikely to affect Google rankings

LOL. Read this: Google prefers valid code.
Spiders are computer programs. They don't see what a browser shows them, they see code. They interpret code. If you have invalid code, spiders won't be able to interpret your code. Therefore they won't understand your content the same way a human being looking at a computer screen would.

It seems our debate has run wild over the top of one of our newest members request for critique.
Please feel free to get back on topic now and share your ideas about Different Colour Productions.

Linda, let me start bringing this off topic thread back on topic

To improve your site, start by doing:

- Learn to code valid HTML and CSS

- Re-code your site in code view(Dreamweaver)/notepad

- Stop using Flash for Navigational purposes; SE's dont like it.

- Stop showing us the Flash thing on every page - its too much
and distracts users

Overall: Nice design, shame about the things listed above.