Social Karma Website Review

SocialKarma · #1 (**permalink**) 10-10-2009, 06:19 PM

Thank you to everyone that takes a few minutes to review our site. The last few days I have had a few mixed reviews, and I really need some good constructive critisim to help me make a choice of improving the site, or starting over. Any advice given will be taken at this point. I have a lot of time already built into this site and logo including business cards, but if people think that it needs to be redone I will look at that! Thank you again.

Site: SocialKarmaMedia

Please send all info to jenhashisaki at yahoo

Truly

Jennifer D Hashisaki

amxfan · #2 (**permalink**) 10-10-2009, 07:44 PM

Hmm Where to start.

The first indication that something maybe wrong is do a simple search in Google for your domain name 'SocialKarmaMedia'. You really should be in the number one slot. Your site is the 5th slot. Looking at the site it looks ok "although I'm not big on flash". What really caught my eye was your source code.

1. No !doctype
2. No Title tag
3. No keywords tag
4. No Description tag
5. No <head>
6. No <body>

To be honest I'm surprised you rank at all.

Take a look at this site. This is how it should be done.
http://blueeyedproductions.com/

SocialKarma · #3 (**permalink**) 10-10-2009, 10:08 PM

I haven't added any of the areas that you are talking about as of yet. I just released the look to see what people thought about layout. I will add everything else for SEO purposes very soon, but I don't want to worry about that until I know if I am going to stick with this site.

amxfan · #4 (**permalink**) 10-11-2009, 12:43 AM

I found the overall look to be good, but also found the text size very hard to impossible to read. Your logo, although it adds to the page and also adds a flare in loading, your navigation takes up way too much room causing your space to be cut in half resulting in very little room to display your content. Personally I feel if you could move your logo and use that room to display your content it would correct most / all of the issues I found that are listed below.

1. Portfillio - Icons were too small and pixeled. The Wordpress link was cut and only said 'Custom wordpress and'.
2. Contact us page. The email and phone box were missing the top border and the message box was missing the left border. You did not provide a phone number or address where I can contact you.
3. Services - I found the navigation to be very small. I also found the text in the info box very hard to read and the light blue on black made it worse.

Thought.
Right now you're only using a small part of the screen. Maybe if you used 100% of the screens width you would have room to display your site properly.

vadimivanov · #5 (**permalink**) 10-16-2009, 02:22 PM

..very strange to review site without such obligatory tags as <html><head> and other
but nevertheless - making flash site - make other html site (same) and give user chance to choose
moreover - making html site is good for optimisation

AxionGroup · #6 (**permalink**) 10-21-2009, 04:43 AM

You should look into creating a version to display for non-flash users. That way when your site gets crawled it has content for search engines to index. Since most people have flash they will see the flash site.

When the site loads I have no clue what your services are. If it was from a search I would have left before it completed loading. Might want to add a short tag line that describes your business.

I like the animation sequences especially in the background. The other comments are right on about the pixelated icons. For such a great background it looks very unprofessional to have low quality icons.

When browsing your portfolio, I chose social media, the box that pops up is so small that it makes it a really bad user experience. Instead of using the box why not use the entire space to the right of the portfolio navigation menu to display portfolio examples?

If you are trying to build search engine ranking you might want to break up your site into multiple flash files. That way you can still add content that will help build a search engine ranking.

chowell · #7 (**permalink**) 10-21-2009, 06:11 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by amxfan

Hmm Where to start.

The first indication that something maybe wrong is do a simple search in Google for your domain name 'SocialKarmaMedia'. You really should be in the number one slot. Your site is the 5th slot. Looking at the site it looks ok "although I'm not big on flash". What really caught my eye was your source code.

1. No !doctype
2. No Title tag
3. No keywords tag
4. No Description tag
5. No <head>
6. No <body>

To be honest I'm surprised you rank at all.

Take a look at this site. This is how it should be done.
Blue Eyed Productions - Susan Adriensen - Actress~Director~Producer

Great points made re: what should be included, but the other example you provided is really not that much better (plz don't take offense if it's yours).

All Flash sites (in general) are poor search engine performers. Yes, you could rank for your own name w/ a Flash site (only requires a couple backlinks), but good luck ranking for any products/services.

Both sites need indexable content that the search engines can properly spider & index, else the site is just "eye candy".

Steelchord · #8 (**permalink**) 10-21-2009, 06:35 PM

Wow.

I'm on the fastest available business connection, and your page still took 15 seconds to load.

And while it's loading, there's nothing but the word 'loading' to see. Pretty, but not a major reason to stick around.

...that needs fixin'. ASAP.

First off, the entry page to your site at least needs to be a basic HTML page. Not a flash page. No heavy graphics.

You can, however, load the flash in the background. Best is to use javascript or something to keep it for last, after the rest of the page is already presented in the browser. Then give the option to visit the flash site.

Wait.

...No back button!? You didn't use the hidden iframe trick for navigability?

No useful tags...

Why is the button to close movies not near the movie? It's a little blue thing at the top of the screen, and easy to miss. Easy to frustrate clients.

A lot of useability features are missing.

No phone number. No FACE for your company. Why would I call you? Unless I had already met you, I wouldn't. As a second step, the site's... meh. As a first contact, it's not the best.

My advice? scrap it and start over. This is not useable for the average consumer.

Also:
Jennifer Hashisaki's resume is not compelling. I want to see things like 'Gave X company a 5 thousand percent increase in target market awareness' not 'I've been learning about this stuff for five years, I'm ready, I swear!'

If you can't point towards clear past success, then use human interest. Don't list your credentials at all, just say "Jen Hash. Her role in consulting: as your established expert in social media. She's 5 foot 3, enjoys fishing and playing frisbee. Fun fact: When working for America Online as a community manager, she let her hair grow out to 4 feet before giving in and getting it cut."

That way, we'll either assume you're so clearly an expert that proof need not be made, or be left wondering. At least you won't be /confirming/ that you haven't done anything yet.

I've seen plenty of real professionals do this on their company sites, because a resume is not necessarily required. It's the COMPANY resume that matters.

alphaomega · #9 (**permalink**) 10-22-2009, 05:29 AM

My thoughts about your website are of positive karma. you shell re-incarnate as an angels. Seriously now, it is innovating and catching. To me it uses with professionalism design wise. I can see eastern influence in your design style. I like it and I would give you job to design for me as a client. The previous comments were about the technical aspects, I am more interested in the visual. So is the every day client. Web is highly visual medium and whether you miss a detail in code matters little. Yes, ranking is important but over rated sometimes. I see highly ranking websites, which wouldn't get my business.
Wish you well with your business.
Paul

sheena · #10 (**permalink**) 10-26-2009, 04:45 AM

I like the design of your website and it is a flash site that truly unique but you need to optimize your flash site. Flash sites still can be optimized. There are several approaches to this: This is a very important approach, although it is often underestimated and misunderstood. Although metadata is not as important to search engines as it used to be, Flash development tools allow easily to add metadata to your movies, so there is no excuse to leave the metadata fields empty.
Provide alternative pages
For a good site it is a must to provide html only pages that do not force the user to watch the Flash movie. Preparing these pages requires more work but the reward is worth because not only users, but search engines as well will see the html only pages.

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