Thread: First website please be gentle

www.hearthstoneconstruction.com

Hello,

You may want to put inks on all your pages.
Your picture are loading very slowly for me.
Your coloring is great for your site.
nicely done, Keep upthe good work.

Jolen

fixed the links not sure how to speed up the pix
thanks for your time

You need to use a decent picture resizer and reduce the pixels and then it will load quicker.

You really need your main content on your homepage though and not just an image. Search engines don't read images they look for content and your home page is the first place they look. Tell the potential customer on your home page what you do, how you do it, why you do it, how they can use your services, what areas you cover etc etc and you will go a long way to actaully drawing in some good business from it.

You have keyworded your home page but yet there is no text on it? This is a total no no. whatever keywords you put in MUST also be on the page you are keywording and in unclickable text. You are acheiving the opposite effect by keywording a page that doesn't have these words on it, let alone any words.

You also need to have good searchable page titles too.

This will help you SEO - The Basics

Those pics are way too slowing...caused my computer to almost stop and I have cable connection...I cannot imagine what a dial up must feel!

I love the picks..but why are there cardboard boxes in the fireplace on your home page..in progress maybe but not the home page?

You are truly a great stone mason! Your pics ..are wonderful! If only they loaded easier.

Like Marincky said, you need 2 things: Content and resize your pictures.

People want information and want it fast (no time to wait for all your picts to load).

Cheers,

ok i have added some text, tried to resize some pix, and changed my meta tags keywords and phrases

ok, the adding of text is good, however (and please take no offence at this) you need to clean up the grammar a touch as believe it or not this will effect SE results too.

If it's ok with you I have rewritten it for you below, just copy and paste it over what you have put on the page: (I am no grammar expert so it might not be 100%, but it's an improvement )

Hearthstone Construction, a masonry company located in the Chattanooga area specialises in mountain stone and stone veneer for residential and commercial buildings.

Stone is one of the most popular trends in today's market, it can bring a custom look to any home or buisness, as well as added value.

Whether you are interested in adding a little stone such as a fireplace, or if you're planning to cover an entire building, Hearthstone Construction guarantee you both quality service and customer satisfaction.

You could really do with a bit more if possible. I appreciate this can be hard to come up with but it is well worth the hard work. See your home page as your shop window, you have to entice me to come inside...

Why should I use your service?... you need to really sell this to me, are you the cheapest in your area? are you the ONLY one in your area doing this maybe? Have you been going 15 years or 15 minutes? What are the benefits of this product? How reliable are you?

Are you getting the picture? All this and more need to be on your site, and most of it on the Home Page without overdoing it. The trick is to get the fine line.

Although by no means the best example, take a look at this site I made www.******-gowns.co.uk

At first glance, very very simple, clean and doesn't look like there is much to it....

But look again, on the Home page alone and within seconds the viewer can tell the following without looking further into the site:

The company name
Exactly what they offer
The exact location
How to contact them
That the products are affordable
Examples of where they could wear these products
Who manufactures the products
What sizes they come in
What other products are available
What type of premises they can visit

it is probably the simplest site I have ever made yet it went straight to the top of the SE's positionings within 4 days for so many very good searchable and 'likely to be typed in' phrases.

Search for any type of special occasion dress in this area and they will appear 99% on page one.

So as you can see, you can keep it short yet very effective if you need to and it can still work a treat.


With regards to your home page picture it is, from what I can remember after typing the above around 640kb. Way too big. No good making it smaller by dragging in the picture, you need to remove it, resize it in a picture resizing program and then replace it. If you do a search on here for pic resizer there are many threads and tips about this.

With regards to your keywords, I think you may need to remove all of them. Firstly there are far too many, four or five is far enough. Secondly you need more precise keywords than this.

To have 'stone' as a keyword on its own means nothing, it's not precise enough. I know nothing about stone masonry, fireplaces etc so I will use a different example but it means the same...

Let's say you had a website selling Almond flavoured chocolate chip cookies.

In your keywords if you put just 'Cookies' this will get you some recognition but it would also bring up 464 million other websites. But if in your page titles and keywords you had 'Almond flavoured chocolate chip cookies' this reduces the search results to just 192,000. So you stand a much greater chance of page one result from this alone than if you just sold or just keyworded for 'cookies' Does that make sense to you? Whatever YOU specialise in that no one else does then promote that not just on your site but within your meta data too.

Hope the above helps. I am being gentle promise, would love to see you do well from this.

Hi, Ditto with above. The links below on images/photos may help.

Good luck.

ok i have added some text, tried to resize some pix, and changed my meta tags keywords and phrases

Hi, You need to put all your text through spell checker also, buisness is spelt business, which is on your home page, also make sure the text is lais out correctly, there is some spacing issues between your text. First impressions refleft on the rest of your company. You still need far more info on the home page, even just a title above the fireplace, go to a few similar sites (don't copy) and see how they lay out the page and what info they are placing on there.

Also you REALLY need to re-size them pics, follow this link http://www.vodahost.com/pix.htm and use this tool, you cannot expect anyone to hang around with the load time, it took around 2 minutes for your inner pages to load.

Please make these changes, they are very important.

Paul

galleries.. i like to use porta - http://www.stegmann.dk/mikkel/porta/
you can put both galleries on the same page..

Here is an example on where I used it:
http://www.holleyjohnson.net/NHILLSMM/album/


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right click on the page and you can change the name of page

the name of the page is only on the home section but not on any of the pages. This way when google is looking at your site.. the links will have the name of the page vs Untitled.
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pics can be reduced in size. Already mentioned

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Contact page - no need for the frame option. Unless u used template. If so, how about making the smaller window bigger.. no need for scroll down within that form.

Hope it helps