Magazine site review

mally

New Member
Hello all.

I woudl appreciate it if you would take a sec to have a look at my magazine subscription website.



magazine-christmas-vouchers.gif


All comments will be considered, please leave your feedback good and bad below.

The logo was deisgned by a lad in the UK, do you like it?

Also, the banner's were from a Contest on digital point.

Cheers

Mally
 
Hi Mally
Well the second banner is wrong there is not 7 weeks till xmas. They look good but for that reason the second 1 sucks :)

Well site wide you are running close to be being penalized by the search engines.
Your H1 is being hidden by the image, that means that when it gets detected, and it will, it will be down to the manual reviewer if they class it as breaking the rules, it may just be automatically penalized by computer algorithm of coarse.

I would not even bother running the risk. Move the H1 on the home page to the
Cheap UK Magazine Subscriptions

As semantically that is your page heading, SEO wise you are hitting what is known as the long tail, magazine subscriptions but also the search term ~ cheap UK magazine subscriptions ~ so that is better and is semantically correct.

We currently compare the prices on the following magazines should be in a Strong tag not a H2. Semantically it's not a heading and you are applying emphasis on the text so strong is your boy here.

SEO wise you reduce the amount of heading tags therefore giving greater weight to the rest of the headers and the correct keyword in those tags.

The title element on the home page should be cheap UK magazine subscriptions as well, Same reasons as above.

The Logo I really like it TBH, but I'm more of a programmer and I'm sure one of the designers would be able to give you a more definite opinion than my personal one.

I would put more padding on the image on the left in your actually body text so as to make sure the text is not flush against the image.

The Linux format magazine doesn't load.

The bottom background image starts to repeat on FireFox.

Being top of Google is all well and good ~ Well that's a brave claim!!! Really I didn't realise you where at the top of Google for all possible search terms as that statement suggests. You don't even say which term because they are not all the same.

SEO is not a 1 time thing. If a competitor gets above you, bare in mind I know how to knock wikipedia out of the results, and you drop to 6 that statement becomes a negative thing not a positive.

Also to me that is a put off, I never use Google due to their hypercritical approach of do what we say not what we do. I know a 2 other good SEO's who are making the switch mainly to Live, because of this, this again is a negative for these people not a positive feature. Google does not own 100% of search believe it or not.

search tool above should also be a onpage link from a usability perspective.

Your search bar is useless to a screen reader as there is nothing to tell them what it is a form for, login, search, newsletter, poll?
You could either include a blank image with a label tag around it and the Alt attribute says search for magazines or include an empty span tag with a title attribute with search for magazies above the input form. However thunder does not read out titles so I would go with the image TBH with a HTML comment of screen reader accessability next to it.

Again on images you need either a title attribute or an alt attribute not both attributes at once, if you have the title attribute leave the alt attribute blank.

This is because screen readers read out loud the alt attribute then the title attribute in your source code.

So for example this is what a blind user would hear on 1 of your images because of this code ~


alt='Compare Prices for Moneyweek Magazine' title='Compare Prices for Moneyweek Magazine'

[link22] Compare Prices for Moneyweek Magazine Compare Prices for Moneyweek Magazine

if you leave out the alt attribute but include the title attribute this is what a blind user will hear ~
[link22] http colon backslash backslash www dot magazinesubscription dot co dot uk backslash images backslash Compare dot png Compare Prices for Moneyweek.
So just add the alt attribute.

Hope that has helped you in some way.
Jaz
 
Great SEO/usability review from Jaz there, nice work Jaz!
I'm sure if implemented that advice will really help Mally.

Here's my opinion of the design side of things...

- I'd possibly look to move the search box up into the header, so the 'Compare the best prices instantly' moves up and the search bar sits under that and above the navigation. This will allow all your site content to move up the page a bit further, and maybe add some form of search icon to make it really clear as I'm sure a lot of people use the search function when first arriving on the site.

- Think about reducing the gap at the top of the page between the top of the header and top of the browser window, whilst there is a drop shadow there it doesn't need as much space it currently has, and whilst on this point you could afford to lose a bit of the space in the header graphics between the logo and the top.

- Looking at the navigation I think the menu text would work better in black on the green background, then maybe have it turn white or green on rollover/mouse over with the black background. I think this will bring a bit more contrast to the links and really highlight the menu.

- In general with images on the site like the woman reading the magazine and even your promotional banners you could use the logo shaping to help link it all together, so slight rounded corners on the top right and bottom left corners.

I personally like the logo/branding, because of the lowercase 'g' in magazine there is a bit of space between magazine and subscription below which looks ever so slightly awkward to me, but that's probably just a 'me' thing, so I wouldn't worry about that! :D

Hope that helps in someway.
Thanks, Greg

(Nice domain name BTW)
 
Nice Greg.

Greg mentioned your navigation I missed that TBH, and I agree with everything he says it makes perfect sense from a design point of view, but also my area, useability, so yeah I would back him and definatly so go with it.

From a useability point of view you also 2 links to the home page from the home page.

You should never link to the current page as this leads to confusion ~

Is this the home page?
Why is this the home page but there is a link to the home page?
O this is not the home page then?

While they are thinking about where they are they are not thinking about subscribing.

The home link should be de-linkined and a differnet colour so as to show the user where they are in your site and to minimalize confusion.

Publishers should also be publish your magizine.
Again SEO wise ~
You are adding better keywords into the link text to the page which will help that page in ranking.

Useability wise -
You again minimalze confusion to what it is, both for customers and publishers as it is more direct.

Category-
Should be magazine categories.
Again seo wise added keyword but useability wise the actual page contains numerous categories and not just 1, also categories can technically mean serveral things this again adds less confusion.

You may also have concalization issues. You need to redirect the non www. url to the www. url as this is technically too sites which dilutes your equity and gives you a duplicate content penalty.

I can write you the code for this if you want, let me know, I'll do it for free lol.

I would also add the meta noindex, follow to the category page.
So -
<meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow" />

This will help to spread your equity to your more important pages more efficiently, by removing the page from the index but also allows the bots to crawl all pages off it.

Your 3 issues for £1 page is huge, I would split it up and make it more obvious to what the sections are, for example group all gardening magazines, all fishing magazines etc.... as this helps by adding lubrication to the information finding process by limiting unnesercary options.

Sorry would have added them in the first post, but I had to split my 2 little darlings up from fighting over who had what car, o 2 and 4 year olds always the best lol.
 
Hello Jazajay and Greg for your early replies.

There's a lot of feedback which I really appreciate. I will work through what you have said will make alot of changes, what you've said make sense especially on the design front. It probably wouldn't be a great Idea for me to start messing to much with tags etc until after xmas incase my site suffers a drop for a short time.

I've updated the banner which should show 5 weeks now, and I've also added your sugestions about linking to the Publish Your Magazine and Magazine Categories sections. Only problem now is that its spread over 2 lines instead of one, but we'll see how it gets on.

Cheers so far!! Keep it coming good :up: and bad :down:...
 
Yeah it has I would at least add the green background so it comes down to the bottom line of all the nav menus so it seems more symmetrical, and make the writing, as Greg suggests, slightly easier to read.

Jaz
 
Hay Mally.
I would say the best approach would be to set a rule similar to this -

#options2 a{min-height:60px;height:60px}

that way the green should expand cross browser and turn to black equally on hover as well on the 1 liners.

Jaz
 
Jazajay said:
Hay Mally.
I would say the best approach would be to set a rule similar to this -

#options2 a{min-height:60px;height:60px}

that way the green should expand cross browser and turn to black equally on hover as well on the 1 liners.

Jaz

Agh genious, thankyou, excellent!
 
Thats alright.

The min-height is for ie7-8, FireFox,Safari, Opera.
IE6 which does not understand min-height needs the height declaration, as IE6 treats hieght the same as the other browsers treat min-height.

Glad I was, in someway, able to help anyway.
Jaz
 
I've had a new feature added, if you've got a second could you try it out and give feedback?

BAsically goto Magazine Subscription , think of a magazine and start to type it into the search box. As you type the name a box should appear that predicts and suggests the magazine name your looking for, you can then click on the name..

What do you think, better than before?

Thanks

Mally
 
Hi Mally
Just for referance sake it is called a word wheel.

Yeah it looks ok, the problem in Firefox 3 is that it is too slow to load up on the first run, every other time it is already cached so loads a lot quicker, that should change in Firefox 3.1 as they have updated the JavaScript Engine, along with other changes, but it is not that obvious the first time and it would only take me a few seconds to type in the name and press enter and I would miss it.

On mine I load an empty div, where the results get displayed, while the results are being fetched, I then load an animated loading gif to tell the user something is happening, once the AJAX connection has reach a state of 4 and a status of 200, bascially the page was fetched successfully, the animated gif gets replaced with the contents of the page you are bringing up.

That way the user knows something is happening.

Jaz
 
Hello Jaz

Thanks for your feedback and advise. Your knowledge is immense! I'll mention what you say to the script programmer.

cheers

Mally
 
O please my ego doesn't need boosting any more buddy :D

If he has problems here's one I wrote, all he needs to add is the loading sequence ~

http://www.designforums.co.uk/web-coding-development/289-ajax-form-validation.html

Not sure how his is set up but this would do it on the one I have done ~

onkeyup="call('path/to/file.php','id you want to load the page into','string to look up','Please wait while we fetch your results <img src=\"path/to/animated/gif.gif\" />');"

And bobs your uncle it should work, the surronding id may need a CSS change to make sure the gif is not flush against the border but that i'll leave upto you.

Any way I hope I have been of some help.

Jaz
 
Hay buddy.
One other thing I noticed was that on the search results page you have order by Relevance.

That is technically impossible as relevance is relative to the user, it should be alphabetically as that is what you are showing, but it was just a little thing I noticed. :)

Jaz
 
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