Feedback For My Website

[Aquatic]

Hi

I've just complete a major redesign of my website SleepForAll.com. It has gone from a very basic custom made Wordpress theme to a much improved Genesis theme which I've extensively tweaked.

The purpose of the website itself is to help people with insomnia and sleep problems by providing them with a range of articles so they can better understand their situation, so I've put a lot of effort into making the website very readable and easy to navigate. I've tried to get the balance right between showing what's on offer and allowing the user to focus on the article in front of them.

I'm still very much willing to tweak the design to further improve it, so I would be very grateful for any feedback or suggestions you may have.

Thanks for looking!

[TheGAME1264]

I'll be honest with you...when I first saw your link and description, my thought was "oh CRAP, another thin affiliate site". I'm glad that I appear to have been wrong.

It looks like you've put some thought into what you were doing and tried to come up with something useful, which is the big thing. My wife's a notorious insomniac herself, so I might have her have a look at this (I, on the other hand, generally sleep through hurricanes). Yes, you've got ads, and you have affiliate products, but in this case, you bloody well should have them...you've actually tried to build something useful, and if you make money off of it, it's well-earned.

The big thing I would recommend is to either include the rel="nofollow" attribute on your affiliate links or (ideally) pass them through a jump script that bots are forbidden from crawling. The latter is a lot harder, though, and for your goal the former should suffice.

The only other thing I would recommend is to use Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; for your body font. Don't default to Helvetica...it looks horrible on any browser on a PC that doesn't have anti-aliasing enabled (e.g. Chrome). No one seems to know this, though, so that's not on you.

I like it, though. It's simple, it's easy to read, the colors are appropriate, etc.

[donkey123]

Looks very clean and visually easy on the eyes, looks very good. Would like to have some move-over images on some of the action buttons "Sign Up Now" and "Send". Also good to have the border change color in the contact fields too, so the user knows where the cursor is.

Have a question, I guess this would be a CMS (php) in the back ground?, but you are using a URL with a .htm on the end, does this help with the Google rankings at all?

[TheGAME1264]

Google generally doesn't care about extensions. I say "generally" because there are certain, fairly obvious, extensions that raise red flags (e.g. .exe, .com, .bat).

He's using WordPress...hence the Genesis theme reference.

[reynoldsdigital]

It looks good but maybe have a header image as there aren't any above the fold on the home page

[TheGAME1264]

I'm not sure on that...normally I'd agree, but in this case, I'm thinking the site's better off without it. At least this way the user can read about the site and get into it as quickly as possible.

Definitely something that should be tested, though. I'm not really sure whether a header would work or not.

[Andrew Yurlov]

Looks very clean and visually easy on the eyes, looks very good. Would like to have some move-over images on some of the action buttons "Sign Up Now" and "Send". Also good to have the border change color in the contact fields too, so the user knows where the cursor is.

Have a question, I guess this would be a CMS (php) in the back ground?, but you are using a URL with a .htm on the end, does this help with the Google rankings at all?

If I'm understanding you I do this all the time. You simply edit the htaccess file to write php extensions as htm and vice versa.

[donkey123]

Thanks Andrew, but why do it? is there a benefit to having a .htm extension?

[Andrew Yurlov]

Thanks Andrew, but why do it? is there a benefit to having a .htm extension?

I read an article a about a year ago. It was something along the lines of "for better security" or something of that sort. I though it was a good idea so started doing that. I guess it disguises the extension from php to html so no one attempts to hack the site?

[TheGAME1264]

People (and bots) will still try to hack it regardless. But the short version of what you probably read is that it's harder to guess the programming language used, and therefore make it harder to hack as a result. It won't stop a hacker who really wants to try...it'll only slow the hacker down.