After only doing very basic HTML in college about 7 years ago, I decided that to save myself a few quid I'd build my own website...

I built one really quickly just to get something up on http://www.mattsanderson.com/ whilst I was building a 'better' one in the background.

I finished that one today, after 3 weeks of oohing and aahing over design, content, etc...

I'm going to get the other-half to re-write most of the content, as she is a writer, but from a design and SEO aspect, I was wondering if anyone wanted to have a look and see what suggestions they have for improvement?

Thanks, in advance...

Link is in my signature.

Bear in mind I am no coder, but I work with a very anal one. Div tags are far preferable to tables, and this bit code:<br>

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Is very very odd.......

Ah, I am going to use that... at the bottom of the page is going to be lots and lots of keywords. :)

Div tags?

http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_DIV.asp

But how then would I use all the images if I didn't use tables?

Using Divs and CSS I would imagine. www.lounge-lizards uses a tabular layout like yours, and is made up of quite a few images. Look at the source code and you will see how HB brought it all together.

That's got to be the neatest coding I've ever seen. :lol: HB must be v.anal! :D

Nice style... looks very calming and subtle. Defo in a good way.

My suggestions:

1) Centre the page rather than left aligned? Just a personal preference of mine
2) Continue the colour to the bottom of the page... not just blank white

re SEO

3) ive recently been working on an SEO project at work. Assuming you want to rate well with Google then keyword spamming will generally get you no where - or possibly even rank you lower.

Google's engine is clever enough to spot meaningless lists of words and recognises them as keyword spamming. One of Google's highest ranking criteria (as far as i know) is how many people link TO your site without you linking back to them... Google used to rate any links to your site highly, so people started saying "you link to mine and ill link to yours etc" so they now rate one way links very highly.

Either way though - if you do go down that route then i assume they will be hidden and not on display as those sites with just LOTS of keywords at the bottom look pretty gash IMHO.


Other than that - really nice looking site.

Good work :-)


Mark

Keywords on the page stopped being useful with the advent of Google. The huge blank bit at the bottom also looks stupid.

Cheers, will have a look at Divs (myself included... ;) ) and reformat the page to exclude the blank bit at the bottom. :) Thanks.

On the note of being left aligned, I originally centre aligned it, but on my work monitor (24") it looks a bit lost - hence my reasoning. You think I should centre align it then?

centre align will look better no matter what screen size

Cool. :)

Okay, today I've found another problem...

If you don't have flash 8 you can't view the gallery, here (http://www.mattsanderson.com/gallery.html), as well as if I open it in IE7, I get a warning that IE has blocked the site because of it running scripts.... grrrr.

How do I add a thing on there, preferably HTML, that says "You need Flash 8, go here to get it..." and also one that says "You have scripts disabled, you need to allow scripts to view the gallery" if they don't have Flash 8 and/or have script disabling? Been googling it but to no avail - as I just don't know what I'm looking for. :(

I also want to ask about Google Analytics, as that's a script, and on IE it says on every page that the script has been disabled - so is Analytics not working for people running IE? And if so,how do I work around that?