Pretend you live in Burlington, Vermont.
Pretend your hungry and want to eat out.
If you can look at it both as a user (hunrgy public) and/or a client (restaurant manager) and let me know from which prespectives your commenting from, that would be great. Anything you'd like to see? Anything you hate?

Thanks,

Fred

the site took about 5 seconds to load with 1 mb dsl

bit slow on loading I would lose the intro/splash page
the site feel is a bit messy and confused and I dont think you would or could find info that quick

dont much care for scrolling adds by google either
I would lose them and provide very quick and easy to find info on the sites subject
by a quick search using cusine and postcode or area code maybe even phone prefix

http://www.dirtydisco.net
I should be asleep

Thanks for taking a look.
By splash page, do you mean the "business card" page w/ the redirect?
That is set to 2 seconds, so there's 40% of 5 seconds.
Search by cuisine? I guess I need to make that more obvious, though I don't know how since it's in the upper left right under out logo.
As for searching by phone prefix, Burlington isn't big enough to warrant that. We will have searching by zip and street when we do hungryvermont.com later this year.
As for the scrolling ads, we hope to sell that spot to restaurants, so those are more or less filler for now.
The Splash page is part of an experiment of mine for the bots. We use frames, and as everybody knows, bots and frames don't mix. What I didn't know when we started is why. I found out when I google us and got a link to the middle page....unframed. It looked horrible and made us look ameture. So, since everything is in folders already, I told the bots to not look in any of our folders. This makes for a very small hit when google's bots come by, so I made some "Bot Food". A bunch of Splash pages chalked full of meat and hidden text and redirects to our home page. The experiments only a few weeks old. I'll keep you all posted on its progress.

Thanks,

Fred

The site would look great without that frame of ads on the right - that really detracts from the site. Is it really necessary?

When I went to your list of restaurants and started clicking on links, I received a Java Console error with each pop-up window. (Viewing with Firefox.)

Have you viewed your site on 800 x 600? Your links on the left cannot be accessed on that screen setting due to the frame layout. (Links below Enter Your Restaurant are cut off.)

FYI - Your index page is formatted with a redirect and most search engines do not index web pages with a redirect to another web page.

In regard to SEO, I think you've maxed out your keyword tag a bit. The tag contains 4111 characters, which is way too many for what would be considered a "robot friendly" web page. You've got 352 keywords - this should 20. You're missing anchor tags and ALT tags plus your title is the URL (should be keywords).

Your best bet for SEO is to redesign without frames and lose the splash screen.

Good luck with your online venture!

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Marcie Wolf
AlphaGeek Web Design | MarcieWolf.com

I haven't tried Firefox yet. It seems to work on Opera and Camino. Hopefully FF will fix itself. I've suggested that our next version go frameless since everybody says to do so for googles sake, but we'll keep the frames for now.

I do realize that the bottom left does get cut off a bit. We are going to redesign that section to make the search forms stand out more.

The ads on the right are not completely necessary, but it is possible revenue and the only logical place for it.

Thanks for the tip about the redirect. Its gone. I read up on that at google. I though that might be a way around the frames issue. They had a sweet little javascript that I added to all of the frame pages so they wouldn't open individually. That was a big problem with SEO when we started. I didn't even know what SEO until I signed up here, and it looks like I have a lot to learn.

What do you know about "noframes"? Would I even need that now that I've got the java in there? We need to work on getting more content and less graphic text. From what little I've read about noframes, it seems its more for the bots than it is for people. Do many people use framless browsers? If it is just for bots, isn't it used to fool them into indexing more than they would otherwise?

Fred

We finally got our redesign done. Its now frameless and has a site map on the bottom. I read that internal links are bot food, especially when anchored. I plan on doing some more of that with some text to be added later. Anyway, I'd like to thank everybody who already commented, and thank those that give the revision a look too. Now I guess I'll wait patiently for google to come by and scan, then I'll have them kill our cached pages. Please let me know what you think of the site.

Thanks,
Fred

(Viewing in Firefox)
When I clicked on a link to a restaurant, I received the following errors (in addition to the pop-up window):

Error: document.jump has no properties

Error: changeScreenSize is not defined

Overall, the site seems very jumbled and lacking in one design focus. Your "Advertise on Hungry Burlington" ads in the body of the site are way too big, not too mention very pixelated. The drop down selection boxes and the menu don't really blend well together.

I regard to SEO, you've got way too many keywords and no image ALT tags.

__________________
Marcie Wolf
AlphaGeek Web Design | MarcieWolf.com

Hi,

I'd try some different things with the search boxes, also. At first, I thought the Search by Cuisine was just a title, then I couldn't figure out how to activate the search after making a selection.

I think people are programmed that the "go" button is smaller than the drop down. So, I'd make the drop down and the search box for the type of food the same size, and make the other buttons smaller, but the same size. Maybe even attract more interest by putting the search stuff in a box, or add some other design element to separate them from the menu, and maybe label that area.

BTW, you need to fix the spelling of the word beginning on the home page.

I think the site is interesting. I don't recall seeing another site where you could search the restaurants' menu. And, if you are keeping the Google ads, glad you made the colors consistent with the site.

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