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Re: Please! Site review for this newbie
From Jeff on 17 August '00
replying to Please! Site review for this newbie posted by Tracey

>This total newbie would sincerely appreciate any time, help and suggestions you can give me on this website. After months of reading this message board and attempting to follow the suggestions found here and on suggested sites (albeit, becoming totally lost at different stages), I have - at last - what looks like a website.
>
>Would you please check out:
>page titles, keywords, meta tags, etc. and let me know if I have done it properly for the search engines listings? Any other feedback on the site would be ever so welcome!!!!!!!!
>
>This is my husbands site and is geared to a VERY specific audience...
>horn & brass players, horn & brass ensembles, horn & brass societies and college/university level schools of music. It's objective is to: 1. sell David's compositions; 2. provide an informative/entertaining site for hornplayers. There's much more to add to the page, but I need to know if I'm on the right track.
>

The black background is elegant but those swirling bullet animations
are cheesey, especially when you have so many of them. Site says it was
created on 6/22/00 and last updated on 6/20/00 (???). Drop both dates and put
"copyright 2000 all rights reserved" (use the circle C symbol for copyright.
That will make your site look valuable and up to date. Be sure to put
the copyright date in an Include file so you can change the date on
Jan 1 each year.

"Last Updated" is so very 1994! Really great sites, such as ESPN, are
updated continuously. Besides, saying a site was last updated in June
means, to me, that it's nearly abandoned!

You have too few key words, only about six as I recall. Surely you can
some more common horn words. The page title tag is of utmost importance
to good SE ranking; yours is good but maybe too short.

You're wasting valuable home page "real estate" with the words.
"Welcome to". Large text at the top (and especially top left) on your
site should be rich with key words and words that sell. Yeah, I know you
want to sound gracious to your guests, but they're looking for the best
damn horn info, not friendship.

Let me put it this way: Have you ever heard a commercial on TV that
began with the phrase "Welcome to our commercial..."? Your next few lines
are loaded with keywords. They're also words that say your husband
knows all about horns and music...Excellent.

Here's a tip you won't see very often. Virtually all major sites now use
Arial or Verdana type font. Verdana was specially developed to be easy
to read on a monitor. You use something called Calligrapher, which I've
never heard of. Bet many of your readers may not have that exact font
on their machines. It kinda looks like Times New Roman which is very
hard to read on a monitor. You use fairly large text so it not a big
problem.

Why the silly brick background on the contact page? Stick with the black,
which works well for your purposes. Professional sites are built with
templates so every page has a consistant look. Professional sites would
NEVER use a brack wall background behind text (even if the site were
for a brick company!).

I think you've been looking at too many personal "home pages" and not
enough high volume commercial sites, such as Amazon or Land's End.

Your site has many strengths. Your brass horn photos are gorgeous.
Loading is fast. Navigation is simple.










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