At present the site has only 4 articles on it.

The main feedback that I would love to recieve is on the site design.

I will be regularly adding new articles to the site and requesting articles to be submitted for review for posting within the website also.

The site is only up a very short time and I will be addressing the layout and content of the home page as well.

Thank you very much for your comments in advance.

Critical or otherwise they are all appreciated.

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Couple of things....

If you are an SEO why on earth are you hosting in the US???

The logo is pixelated

The adsense ad on the right of the main page seems to be floating down into the body of the page - it looks a bit odd

The "contact us" link should be to a page not a mailto link - if you are going to use a mailto link make it obvious that it isn't leading to an actual page

The layout at present is quite distracting - it's hard to focus on the text of the articles

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Quote:

Originally Posted by blacknight Couple of things....

The hosting that I am using now is part of a package that allows me to host multiple websites under one overall cost. This would be the first regional specific website that I have developed and for the moment I have decided to put it upon this hosting plan.
I know that your business is predominantly website hosting and I do appreciate your input with regards to this aspect of the site, but my business is SEO and I am fully aware that geography of hosting may play a small role in determining language or country specific targeting and relevancy at the search engines. As the site develops I will consider changing hosting providers for this particular website, but at present the plan I am using will suffice as I will not be featuring within SERP's for a few months.

Quote:

Originally Posted by blacknight The logo is pixelated

I'm afraid that this is one of the things on the "to-do-list". I really have little experience with graphics programmes and I agree with you that this is something that will need to be changed fairly quickly. Time to start reading through those Adobe Photoshop tutorials

Quote:

Originally Posted by blacknight The adsense ad on the right of the main page seems to be floating down into the body of the page - it looks a bit odd

You're right again. It does look odd. But to be quite honest, it's eye-catching and has led to a considerable amount of click-throughs already. I think I'll leave it where it is for the moment.

Quote:

Originally Posted by blacknight The "contact us" link should be to a page not a mailto link - if you are going to use a mailto link make it obvious that it isn't leading to an actual page

Thanks for the advice on this one. It can be very irritating when Outlook decides to load up without a visitor realising that they are actually going to send an email whilst clicking a button. I will be changing this one today.

Quote:

Originally Posted by blacknight The layout at present is quite distracting - it's hard to focus on the text of the articles

The layout will be changed as the site is propagated with more articles. "Most recent article(s)" and "Most popular articles" will appear on the right-bar as the number of articles within the site increases.

I really appreciate all of your comments Blacknight. I might be looking to get some hosting off you for this particular website in the near future. Let me know if there is anything else that you feel could be improved.

Many thanks again,
Seohelp

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It depends on your definition of small role, but you will most likely never turn up in the Irish SERPs with a .com on a US server. You should either host in Irish IP space or get a .ie.

I would recommend removing the logo text completely from the image and replacing it with plain text floated in the same area. (in <h1> tags) It should help your SEO efforts.

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Hi SlitheryImp,

Thanks for the feedback.

To be honest I've had plently of success of driving traffic from numerous of different country search engines and their respective results pages without having to have a .whatever or concerning myself greatly with hosting country. As the site develops I will no doubt turn to a host in Irish IP space to help with the country specific rankings. This is one area of SEO that gets too much attention due to country specific hosting companies stressing that you will most likely never turn up in the "insert hosting countries postcode here" results pages.
It makes sense. I agree completely with you on this. But it is one of the many factors that contribute only slightly to search engine results.

As for the logo. Thanks for the advice also. This is something that I'm working on now.

I'd love you to drop back to see what you think.

I'll post a message as soon as I have the changes made.

Thanks again.

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Thanks for all the feedback. I feel it is important to get a rough idea of what people think of a site design in the early stages before the site-wide changes become overwhelming (even with CSS)

As I have a bit more traffic to analyse over the previous number of days/weeks I can see that Firefox users seem to be giving IE a run for their money. Got to appeal to the masses and it seems that in Firefox this adsense ad is just not appealing.

Has anyone any coding suggestions on how I could make it blend a wee bit better?

Many thanks in advance.

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The header is worse than it was, I have a widescreen monitor and it doesn't look pretty when expanded.

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