I am not the normal website designer. I have been on the web with a site since 2001 and have built a small company that supports my wife and myself. Website design, SEO and Pay for Click programs are much, much different now days. It all really requires a dedicated employee. I am too small to do that so I plug away. With that said I need feed back on my Laptop and Desktop security solutions : www.LaptopSecuritySolution.com web site. This has been up for almost two years and I can't even get it into dmoz.org. I need this site to make it and I really enjoy helping people secure their equipment. How badly is my design hurting listings?

Firstly, DMOZ is human-edited so it's not down to you if the listing hasn't been accepted yet. Having said that, it's not going to harm your rankings as it's practically useless on an SEO ground these days.

Your design is certainly not as bad as some I've seen in the past, but the small, bold white text on a blue background strikes me as hard to read and the general text layout is quite chunky and concise. However, I'm no design expert, but I'm sure there'll be one along shortly who can offer a more professional opinion

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Thanks for the feed back. In the security corporate trade shows and the security industry in general uses the color blue. That's what I was trying to do. I agree the text just isn't right but I've played with other fonts and sizes.

Perhaps if it were larger, broken up into smaller chunks (intersected with pictures, perhaps) and not in a bold font, that would help things.

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-tamecrow | UK SEO Company | Follow me on Twitter...

I don't think that the actual appearance of the site can hurt anything...however the design from the back end could be hurting you.

You should look into table-less website layouts. You have a lot of nested tables, many of which contain nothing but space.

You need to keep in mind that you want a HIGH content to code ratio, and currently, you've got quite the opposite.

Getting rid of inline styles, and putting all styling into a separate style sheet will lighten up your markup considerably.

Your menu could very easily be put into any unordered list, and reduce code as well.

Have a look for some tutorials on CSS/table-less design, and that should get you on the right track.

Best of luck.

I second tamecrow, your site isn't as bad as others I've seen. However, for a site that sells security items, how "secure" and "comfortable" do you think your visitors and potential clients will be after viewing your site? You need to consider the objections a visitor may have when entering a site such as yours; if they sense a lack of professionalism or lack of authenticity, you can certain that they will be out of there within the first 3 seconds. It takes only seconds to convince a visitor to stay or leave. If you want to increase your sales, you must increase conversion: And in that case a more professional look that encourages a sense of "security" to your visitors is crucial. I have more literature about this topic if you are interested. Good luck!

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The design will have little or no effect on listings/ranking, but this site has some problems.

It does not validate - 22 errors on the home page. More disturbing in is that in IE7 and FF the menu remains in place as the browser is expanded/contracted, but the the rest of the site moves with the browser.

Also in IE7 this page is unviewable:
USB Lock Disk Lock : LaptopSecuritySolutions.com

That chain across the top doesn't look too secure either - it has every link cut...

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Ok, so appearance doesn't have much of an effect on SEO. But the actual construction does which also can effect appearance I would assume. I used obviously primitive HTML with tables and no or very little CSS. If I have the site rewritten with the basic same look you are saying that I would have a much greater chance of getting higher listings? Where can I go the have this done at an affordable price. Is this a job that could be put out onto a Job Board for bids?

It's probably a matter of personal taste, but the Laptop Security movable menu, which clings to my mouse pointer until I click it off, is a small annoyance to me

I think your first need to decide what keywords you want to add. Right now yo dont have any keywords on your meta tag. When you decide what keywords you format your text on the page to reflect those keywords. You also dont have a header on your main page. Add some title like " Providing the best in laptop security" and make it a h1 or h2 heading with the font size set to 3 so that the h1 heading doesnt look too big. Id also chg the logo to something that characterizes your site.

And youll need to wrk on getting links. SEO is mundane and requires time. Hope this helps

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Tom, changing the code to reduce the amount of code is typically not a major factor in rankings. It is one of the dozens of minor factors that can have a small impact on rankings. (and by small, I mean all of these factors might add up to one or two positions of movement) However, you could still benefit by updating the code - you would have less bandwidth usage per pageview, and users would have faster load times.

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I would suggest putting the dark blue in the background and use black text on white or light color because it will look much cleaner. Then visitors will actually be able to read the text. I will not even try to read it to check your copy and I bet the editor at DMOZ felt the same way. Fix it and then resubmit… but don’t hold your breath and don’t worry if it doesn’t list you, it isn’t the end all of good rankings.

The copy or textual content should be the main focus for good listings. It needs to include your keywords and there are many ways to optimize keywords within the text to boost the value a spider might place on it. For instance bolding keywords, bullets, links within the text and so on but it has to look natural in arrangement to the human eye.

The code needs to be validated and clean so that spiders can get through it without a snag and not all errors will trip a spider but some code errors can. Others around here probably know more detail about that issue.

There is a DOCTYPE on the home page but the other pages I viewed do not have it. It isn’t going to help listings but it will help browsers render all of your pages correctly.

Tables and css on the page will make no difference to the spider as long as the code is valid so they can get through it without a hang up. Bloated code will make pages slow to load for visitors who don’t have high speed connect so tables are frowned upon for that reason. Tables add more code for designers to wade through while editing as well. Editing the site with css is much easier than the tables too!

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Clicken
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Can anyone provide a solid resource on that? As far as I know, there's only so much code a spider will wade through before it stops.

I am speaking from experience. My site was riddled with tables and hundreds of errors however the site was crawled, indexed and listed in the top positions. It really doesn’t matter to the spider which code you use as long as it able to get through it. I have heard that spiders are limited to the length that it will crawl but it doesn’t care if it is table or div or even if frames are used.

CSS makes the code slimmer so that you can keep the size of it down which is good for several reasons. Allowing the spider to see it all before it has to leave is just one of the reasons. In my case, the pages were well below the limit of the spiders even with all the tables because my site is relatively small compared to others.

I have seen those limit numbers in another thread,… that answer is here somewhere.

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Math Flash Cards Online

That's exactly what I'm talking about.

If the page has 500 lines of empty table cells and other filler junk before there's a shred of content, the spiders may never get to it.

I appreciate all the good feed back. I am currently have the site worked on using iFreelance.com.
-Tom

I have seen some of my site pages shoot up in the rankings once I removed tables. Just a real world experience.

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