Insight and honest (but not excruciatingly honest) review needed :)

bamme

Senior Member
Hi everyone,

Ive just finished a volunteer project - The Best Music Shop - Find New Music, Exclusive New Songs, Download Free Music Legally!

This, after a first rework and some research into the Flash components and swfobject, took a couple days to put together and get online - I did try to persuade them to wait a little while, but they said they'd rather I tweak things afterward.

Problem is, having creating everything from graphics to code to copy and getting all the content together and in the right formats (the mp3s..), and doing the flash replacement content too in 12 hours, ive stared at it so much im a bit sick of it and finding hard to see it with 'fresh' eyes in order to tweak and polish it.

Does anyone have any ideas/comments about:

1) How i could improve overall look and feel - quite like the basic layout and am going to stick with it for a while, but was thinking, does it 'go' with recent trends?

2) SEO - does it look too keyword-ified? (For the average user as well as for Google/people who will give me bad points if im too SEO'd up..) and is my very first attempt at SEO techniques correct?

3) Anything I could add - Id like to make this a bit more professional. I dont mean corporate, I just mean smooth, perhaps more interactive, and a bit 'fun' really, as well as anything that eases navigation and user-friendliness, and the direction from homepage to sales page/free music page.

4) I dont like that contact us link in the top menu - its not important enough, I think I could probably make use of that space for a better feature or section. I was first thinking forum.. and then i saw how many forums there were for upcoming artists and new music.. Does anyone have any suggestions?

Thanks for the insights :)
 
the top menu is broken, if I click link 1 on the index page it all shifts to the right, then the link 2 on that page is a dead end.

I think the 'rays' of light need to be extended upto the top of the page, currently they just chop off and the fourth one (nearly vertical at the bottom) isn't needed.

I'd also say the fonts are maybe a size too small and the aerial from the stereo cutting into the c in music could be improved a bit.

the rounded corners with text look to have a triangle of different colours next to it rather than the backing colour.
 
Since posting this have you made the revisions? I can't see any of the things that were pointed out at least.:up: Although link called 01 still seems to do nothing?

If there were anything else they would just be minor things. The vast empty background, though I don't know what you would fill it with. And personally I don't care for colorscheme of yellow and aqua green(teal). But really thats just personal opinion. You may have those set as your official colors or something and thats fine. If it were my site, I would go with a light brown, tan or coffee color for the back ground and a middle tone blue for the graphic and headers. I also love the combination of brown and sky blue for some reason.
 
Hi All,

thanks for your feedback - fixed the link error and other than Rhonda's dislike of the colour scheme I'm relieved theres not too much else wrong with it (hm..i did think aqua and yellow worked.. but now not so sure. maybe leave that for a later redesign hah.)

And yes a lotta people are going for sky blue and brown these days! Does look nice. Or brown and pale green as well.

Anyway, I've made the revisions just didnt upload them to the same place, so thankyou for the help guys,

I wondered - is there any more way here, apart from php includes, that I can cut down the amount of code within these pages?

(I dont want to sacrifice SEO..)

Emma
 
emmaburge said:
…I wondered - is there any more way here, apart from php includes, that I can cut down the amount of code within these pages?…

1) Includes won't cut down the code client-side, only server-side, so that wouldn't matter.

2) Yes—get rid of this:

HTML:
<div class="box-t"><div class="box-r"><div class="box-b"><div class="box-l">
          <div class="box-tr"><div class="box-br"><div class="box-bl"><div class="box-tl">
...
</div></div></div></div>
          </div></div></div></div>

It's atrocious lol. Use some CSS3 for round corners.
 
Thanks Harry. For that I followed a tutorial posted 2009! Should have known there was probably a better way to do it to be honest just by looking at it :)

Do the IE people get to see the corners?

Emma
 
Nah no IE does as yet, but it's a worthy sacrifice. As long as they can access your content the corners really don't matter.
 
True :) I should make friends with css3 really..I havent really familiarised myself with it at all

Thanks again
Emma
 
@Harry
Got to say Harry that site doesn't work very well without images dude. :D

@Emma
SEO wise make this sound better ~
<title>The Best Music Shop - Find New Music, Exclusive New Songs, Download Free Music Legally!</title>

That might be all right for search engines but title elements that read well are a lot better for CTR's and seem less spammy. And coming in from a SEO side that being results personalization is a site that gets clicked say 100 times and has a conversion rate of 3% as relevant as a competitors site that gets clicked 50 times but has a conversion rate of 80%?

Not saying it is a ranking factor but cant see why it wouldn't be, plus you should be aiming for a higher conversion rate any way and by making it sound more coherent the chances of it being clicked are higher not that it would mean you would get a higher conversion rate just a higher CTR, but you can't have one without the other for the majority of sites. :)

You have 3 H1 tags ~
<h1 id="title"><a href="index.html">the<em>best</em>musicshop</h1>
<h1>To a fresh way to find new music and exclusive new songs before anyone else.</h1>
<h1><A href="download-free-music-legally.html">Download free music legally here</A>, get <a href="find-new-music-artists.html">new mp3s at low cost</a>, and be the first to hear exclusive new songs before they&rsquo;re released!</h1>

You should only have 1 as that is the main heading for a page, that probably will seem a tad spammy TBH especially the third one.
<h1 id="title"><a href="index.html">the<em>best</em>musicshop</h1>

That should be your only H1, the rest should be H2's or paragraphs TBH.

The second paragraph under the welcome should also start with You can, would make it sound better TBF.

Hope it helps
Jaz

Key:
Blue
~ XHTML
 
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