Website for Review
http://www.pagesforchildren.com

Additional Comments
Any suggestions are greatly appreciated and bluntness won't hurt my feelings.

Thank you for your time in advance in case I forget to tell you later.

nice website with a concept but can be changed with the header and footer for better look and feel

livilou wrote:

Website for Review
http://www.pagesforchildren.com

Additional Comments
Any suggestions are greatly appreciated and bluntness won't hurt my feelings.

Thank you for your time in advance in case I forget to tell you later.

Do you mind going into more detail?  Please understand, I am self taught and may not understand what most would consider obvious.

Thank you for your time.

Hey livilou!

I've had only a quick look at your site. Here are a couple of opinions that you may find helpful:

Get away from the Times New Roman font to something that looks more like you know what you're doing. Verdana is quite attractive.

The information on the home page is too wordy. Compact the info, possibly with some dot points.

Although you've set out to tell me what your organisation does, I really still don't know.

I think you should redesign the site to have one page for one section. Too wider diversity on the home page.

A few pictures would go a long way. Not pictures of sick kids; pictures of stuffed toys and colouring pictures.

Set your info out a bit like this:

Pictures
A few pictures would go a long way. Not pictures of sick kids; pictures of stuffed toys and colouring pictures.

Redesign
I think you should redesign the site to have one page for one section. Too wider diversity on the home page.

Be Specific
Although you've set out to tell me what your organisation does, I really still don't know.

Compact Information
The information on the home page is too wordy. Compact the info, possibly with some dot points.

You have no home page link.

Your main column is too wide for easy reading. I'd limit the width of the page to say 1000px. Add an extra column at the left containing most of the nav you currently have at the top. Only have the main nav at the top. About 500px is a good width for the main column. That leaves you two columns at 250px wide each.

Is this an international site/organisation? You need to make your geographic area of mission clear.

Pretty tough, huh! Ah well! I'm sure there would be much more with a closer look. Web design isn't something you just sit at the computer and do. Of course, it all depends what you want to accomplish and who your audience is.

How do you expect to get traffic to the site? Are you counting on search engine traffic?

The question I have is what is dot points?  I've never heard of it.

Also, I'm trying to get traffic through search engines and link exchanges.

But thanks for the advice.  I'm working on it but be patient with me.

Dot Points. An indented list.

Heading
  *  Point 1
  *  Point 2
  *  Point 3

Here's the html code, but if you're using a WYSIWYG editor you won't really need to know any html.

<ul>
  <li></li>
  <li></li>
  <li></li>
  <li></li>
  <li></li>
</ul>

So, how are you ranking in the SERPs for your main keywords? I'm guessing you may not be up to speed on this. I'll explain if you wish.

Yeah! That's looking better.

I'd go a bit smaller with the font.

Capitalize your main heading.

Try you headings left justified and see what you think.

I found the SERPs so at least I don't look dumb on that subject, but I had to do a search for it.  lol  And no, I'm not anywhere near the top.  I'm trying to get links to my site that are one way, but it's slow going and we don't really have a budget so I'm doing this all myself.  Needless to say, it's slow going.  One of these days, maybe I'll have the ranking I want, but I just wish it were now, which I'm sure most everyone wishes for their site.  I'm still new at this and self taught so I know there is a lot I still have to learn.

Thank for the assistance.

I changed the font size, but I didn't really like it left justified so left it centered.  But thanks for the advice.

Have a great day.

That looks a lot better.

Just a small thing, and I'm guessing a bit here. I wonder if that font is Tahoma and not Verdana. Have a look at the font in your Google ads. Looks better to me.

To achieve the ranking you want is a major job, much bigger than building a website by the method you've used.

Just to get a feel for the enormity of the task, go to this site: http://www.huomah.com/Search-Engines/Se … ssins.html and watch the video. It's good basic stuff.

Then have a bit of a look around the HuoMah site.

The point is, if you're not on page one for your chosen search terms, you won't get much traffic to your site from the search engines. And of course, you must rank for search terms that targeted traffic is searching on.

That leaves other methods of getting traffic which can be very expensive and/or a lot of work.

I don't want to burst your bubble, but I do think you should come to grips with search engine traffic and other methods before you go too much further.

Perhaps you'd like to give us your most wanted keyword (search term) and I'll see what the competition and relative search traffic is. Might surprise us one way or the other.

Here is a list of my keywords on my index page: free, program, love, kids, sick, coloring, health, children, donations, terminally, ill, hospital, help, non-profit, agency, page, family, special, need, smile, comfort, book, cards.

Right now, I'm trying to see how I can reword it to help some of my keywords show up better, but sometimes I can't seem to figure out how I want to say things.  I can see it in my head, but getting it down on paper is hard.

OK. I strongly recommend that you go to the Huomah site to get a feel for the enormity of the SEO (search engine optimization) task. The site is owned by Davis Harry, known on the web as theGypsy.

TheGypsy has an e-book on basic SEO, directed to beginners such as yourself. It's US$10, from memory, and well worth the money. A giveaway price, he provides this as a service because he's such a nice bloke. You'll find a link on his site.

Now:

The list of keywords you have given above is your meta keywords. SEs (search engines)no longer use these because people spam them in order to manipulate the SERPs (search engine results pages). I never bother to fill them in.

You should target one primary keyword or key term and one, two or three secondary keywords or key terms on each page, in the text content. (Key terms = key phrases = search terms).

If I was searching for a free graphics programme for my photography, I'd type in free graphics programme but if I was looking for a website about a programme to assist sick kids, I wouldn't type in free programme. I might type in sick kids or support sick kids. If I had too many results I might have another go with support sick kids NSW (NSW is my state in Australia).

So, you see, for me to find your site, you will need a page that features the term, support sick kids, and possibly my geographic area. You might even qualify the type of support: emotional, practical, etc.

Maybe you should have your mission statement in a box on every page. It could stand a rewrite. I think your mission is a good bit more compelling than what you've stated.

Can't help a lot more than that, short of taking over your site and redesigning, and I'm not about to do that. Please do follow up on The SEO Handbook. There's also heaps of great stuff on this site. Use the search function.

Best wishes

Laurie_m is so useful

I don't have much to say after all this except i think the right menu looks to much like Google ads, at first i was sure they were some, so i didn't even bother looking at them.

Might want to change this if you want

Thank you for all of your help and advice.  And while it would be nice if you would redo my site, I would never expect you to.  It's something I have to learn to do myself and will with the help of people like you around. 

Again thank you, it's greatly appreciated.

livilou,

Its amazing to see how much heart and soul is in that website. I had a quick look at it to see what you're site is about. Seems to me that you're a company that provides books for children who are in the hospital, am I correct?

If that is the case then perhaps you should make the website more inviting. Because lets face it.. You go on the site and you see text upon text, then some more text, a few links and that is it.

Perhaps you should put the text in a nice and organized tables, the links (buttons) should all be on the left side (like the average site) and have a header where a happy child is ready a book.

Because the main point of the site is.. the second I enter the site I need to know what the site is about. So you need to include some images

Hope this helps!

really a wonder full site... ur thought for helping children is good....

i will forward this site link to all of my frens....

I think I have it now.

Thank you all for your comments.  I hope everyone has a great day.

too simple  i  must  say

why  not  use a  cms  script , just  like  joola

phpnuke and  so  on

because I don't know php.

Nice design and color, I hope you will add more content