www.thelittlewoodshop.co.uk

I would be very grateful if someone could give their input on this wooden toy site I'm working for, I'll be happy to reciprocate a review on request. I'm mainly interested in the following areas:

1. Good Search Engine Optimisation
2. Clean, Easy to use interface
3. Browser Compatibility

Thanks.

Welcome to the forum Woodshop,
I've had a quick look and what you've got so far really does establish a nice little woodshop especially the subpages.

To answer 1. I'd say yes you've done a good job especially with the naming of your pages, but you may think about elaborating on a couple of things depending on what you think.

For example, you have dolls_houses.htm as one subcategory, which is fine, but Dolls-House--Two-Storey_item94.htm as an item rather than /dolls_houses/Two-Storey_item94.htm as the search engines can pick up on things like that and stops your top level getting cluttered with htm files.

Another problem is that the second pages on your subcategories get a lower ranking since they are more clicks away from your main page, is it possible to increase this from 5 to 10 items or is that too much?

The site map doesn't seem to be working and neither do the images on traditional_wooden_toys.htm

I don't know what it is about the front page, but it doesn't especially appeal to me and I think you need to look at that again possibly.

My Mozilla Firebird isn't currently working but IE6 looks great.

Rob

1. Good Search Engine Optimisation
- Your images are labled perfect. However, I won't even look again at your source code. It is just one line, very hard to follow. If you can provide the source code I will look it over and make sure it looks good.

2. Clean, Easy to use interface
- Clean? Yes, but looks nasty. East to use? Yes, I can easily navigation.
You might want to think about changing the style of your template. I really dislike the colors and the format of it all. You might want to organize it down the center of the page to have apeal to more people.

3. Browser Compatibility
- Works on Mozilla/IE
-----------
Also..
Your SiteMap is a broken link. http://www.thelittlewoodshop.co.uk/sitemap.htm

Your web site seems to be very optimized in the search engines. Brief report:
Google (245)
HotBot (0)
AllTheWeb (1
AltaVista (21)
Lycos (1
MSN (0)
AOL (245)
Have you paid at all to have thiese results?

Overall I enjoyed the website and I felt that I could trust your company to buy a product online.

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Mr. Bob's Web Design - Tirelessly looking for ways to enhance the customer base of your business.

Fixed, Thanks. I think the traditional wooden toys page got messed up yesterday when I was updating some images and renamed them.

At the moment I'm experimenting with different directory structures and I'll probably take up your advice soon. My root directory isn't cluttered since most of the pages are dynamic and I also use a lot of Apache's mod rewrite.

I might increase it a little but obviously it's a matter of loading times, and not wanting to overwhelm the customer with to many choices at once.

Your right, I really need a new front page.


The current design is I think the 5th and also I think the ugliest. I need a lot of work but with it coming so close to Christmas I don't want to mess around to much.

Are you sure you have the right site? I can't even find myself on alltheweb or lycos.


Thanks for the help guys.

Yes option overload can be a problem, but as for load up times have you thought of using GZip compression, (have a look here: www.gidnetwork.com/tools/gzip-test.php ) to reduce your file sizes significantly. You'll have to play around with your .htaccess to do this rather than playing with PHP scripts unless your willing to run PHP on .htm & .html pages. If you have no idea what I'm talking about then please let us know


Your welcome

Rob

p.s. there are various different ways to find yourself on the search engines e.g. allinurl:www.thelittlewoodshop.co.uk (works for google, ATW etc.)

- I have the site you listed above.

Check out:
1) http://www.alltheweb.com/search?cat=...dshop.co.uk%2F

2) http://search.lycos.com/default.asp?....uk%2F&tab=web

Do you want some help with redesigning the site or cleaning it up a bit?

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Mr. Bob's Web Design - Tirelessly looking for ways to enhance the customer base of your business.

From what I can tell, your site hasn't been spidered by ATW/Altavista/Ink, only shows up in Google.

You can submit it for free at alltheweb.com.

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- Hmm.. Did you miss my post? Or was my post wrong [the one above yours]?

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Mr. Bob's Web Design - Tirelessly looking for ways to enhance the customer base of your business.

no pages crawled

Website mentioned by other sites

Rob

As Rob mentioned above, you are looking at link popularity vs search engine saturation.

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