Website Makeover Recommendations

I post case studies from time-to-time on this blog.  Hopefully the suggestions are useful to everyone.  If you have questions of concerns about your website please contact me at your convenience.

We usually change the names to protect the guilty.  And this is no exception. "Frank" has a website that sells services and information.  He gets some, but not a lot of traffic, and is not selling much of anything.  The site was built by a graphic designer friend of a friend.  That said, the site is not very attractive.  Different font sizes, styles and colors make it look un-even and disorganized.

There are several misspellings on the Home page and even more on interior pages.

The message on the Home page does not give visitors an instant clue as to what the site is about and how someone would benefit from Frank's services.

There really is no good call to action on the site.  He does have a phone number listed and offers "free estimates."

He claims to be "the biggest and the best" of what he does in his area, but offers no concrete evidence to support those claims.  He has one testimonial on the site on a "Testimonials" page.  Nobody reads testimonials pages, but testimonials are powerful influencers, so I recommend spreading them thruout a website.

The title tags, description tags and keyword tags are all the same on every page.  They should be different for EACH page.  There are some very broad terms that will be difficult to rank highly for and there are too many keywords in his keyword tag, not that the major search engines put much stock in those tags anymore.

He does not rank at all on the 3 keywords he says are his most coveted.  I suggested that he test all his keywords to see how popular they are, how much competition he has for each and recommendations for other keywords and phrases to consider.  There are free keyword discovery tools for this.

He has 3 incoming links to his site and none are authority sites or have much pagerank.  I recommended that he register his site with search engines, especially Yahoo! and Google.

I hate being negative, but I really can't find anything positive to say about this site. I feel like Simon Cowell.

Despite the site being built by a graphic designer, it really needs to be re-done to look halfway attractive, which will help build trust with prospects.  A written plan should be developed that outlines his specific goals and the exact techniques that will be used to achieve them.

He asked if he should be doing pay-per-click. Not until the other issues that affect conversion are addressed.

The bad news is the site fails in so many ways.  The good news is he has many opportunities to fix all the failures.  And as Terry Savage would say, "That's the savage truth."

-- Kurt Scholle

Comments

[Fred H Schlegel]

You said: "Despite the site being built by a graphic designer..."
Projects fail for so many reasons. Sometimes it is due to a weak link but more often there is something bigger going on. If the vision for a project is not well thought out, or feedback (even negative!) is not clear then even the best graphic designer can find themselves floundering for lack of direction. And as an aside - I love the artists I work with who are great proofreaders, but that really isn't why they are here.

[Kurt Scholle]

I agree. It takes more than a graphic artist. The whole team helps build website success. That includes copywriting, programming, business development, marketing, server administration...

Thanks for your comment!

-- Kurt