March 1, 201115 yr Hello everyone Just wanted any advice or suggestions on my first website for my driving school. Having done a lot of research on other schools websites, I generally find them over the top with too much information or take ages too load. I've tried too keep it nice and clean with a fast loading time and only giving the information, a potential student may need. I might add images at a later date, however I am worried about loading times as I'm trying to gain custom from areas with either dial up or slow broadband. Any ideas or thoughts on how to improve it would be great thanks, the website address is advantagedrivingschool.org.uk. Once again thanks.
March 1, 201115 yr Here are my first thoughts: Not centred?! The design could be applied to thousands of trades, nothing specific to driving Bold navigation is hard to read, even with 20/20 vision Footer pieces are far too bold and spaced The content of each page is not centred Then I looked at the code: So much inline styling - I don't need to point out examples! Clean it up! Invalid code (though not necessary, it's always welcomed!) Plenty of things to work on, the code primarily and then swiftly on to the design. It's just not what I expect to see when I visit a driving school website. That's just criticism, the website is not bad at all for your first ever! It's also refreshing to see that you're thinking about your target market whilst designing the site. You're right - numerous driving school websites have a huge, bandwidth hungry, ugly Flash animation of a car wiggling/shaking or something similar; completely unnecessary. Edited March 1, 201115 yr by andyl
March 1, 201115 yr Author Here are my first thoughts: Not centred?! The design could be applied to thousands of trades, nothing specific to driving Bold navigation is hard to read, even with 20/20 vision Footer pieces are far too bold and spaced The content of each page is not centred Then I looked at the code: So much inline styling - I don't need to point out examples! Clean it up! Invalid code (though not necessary, it's always welcomed!) Plenty of things to work on, the code primarily and then swiftly on to the design. It's just not what I expect to see when I visit a driving school website. That's just criticism, the website is not bad at all for your first ever! It's also refreshing to see that you're thinking about your target market whilst designing the site. You're right - numerous driving school websites have a huge, bandwidth hungry, ugly Flash animation of a car wiggling/shaking or something similar; completely unnecessary. Err you don't hold back Andy I'll give ya that. I'm using Web Page Maker to create my website, when you mention it not been centered I take it you mean on the monitor? This maybe down to me using a notebook, so I suspect on a monitor with a high resolution it maybe to the left? Any ideas how to sort this out? Thanks for your advice and I've taken it on board.
March 1, 201115 yr In addition to what Andy's said, you have keyword-laden text hidden behind your header. That will get you dropped from Google's index, they really hate sneaky black-hat SEO tricks.
March 1, 201115 yr Err you don't hold back Andy I'll give ya that. I'm using Web Page Maker to create my website, when you mention it not been centered I take it you mean on the monitor? This maybe down to me using a notebook, so I suspect on a monitor with a high resolution it maybe to the left? Any ideas how to sort this out? Thanks for your advice and I've taken it on board. Well, you did ask Yes, I'm on a 27" monitor, so the website is tiny and in the top left of my browser, very odd to look at. To centre your website, do the following: Add this line right after the <body> tag on each page:<div id="container"> Add this line right before the </body> tag on each page:</div> Add this before your </head> tag on each page:<style type="text/css"> * { text-align:center } #container { margin:0 auto; width:982px; position:relative; } </style> That will center your website, but will also center a lot of text in other elements. This is an unfortunate necessity to trick IE into centering the site. You will need to use text-align:left; on elements you want the text to align left within.
March 1, 201115 yr I find this works: body { text-align: center; } #container { margin: 0 auto; text-align: left; } Child elements will inherit from #container rather than body.
March 1, 201115 yr I find this works: body { text-align: center; } #container { margin: 0 auto; text-align: left; } Child elements will inherit from #container rather than body. Ooh. Last time I did that, IE6 centering was screwed again - it was a while ago now I must admit
March 1, 201115 yr Might have to use position:relative as well to trigger HasLayout in IE6, I admit it's been a while for me too.
March 1, 201115 yr Author Thanks for all your advice, I think I may have sorted the centering problem. I may be out of my depth on this website design thingy, you lads really know what your doing. With regards to putting keywords in my header, are google really not keen on this? I'm getting conflicting advice on that subject. Only put my website on a couple of free business listings last night and I'm getting calls already to do a paid listing. Will see how it pans out before I go ahead. Once again thanks.
March 1, 201115 yr Author Thanks for all your advice, I think I may have sorted the centering problem. I may be out of my depth on this website design thingy, you lads really know what your doing. With regards to putting keywords in my header, are google really not keen on this? I'm getting conflicting advice on that subject. Only put my website on a couple of free business listings last night and I'm getting calls already to do a paid listing. Will see how it pans out before I go ahead. Once again thanks.
March 1, 201115 yr Google does not like it. Fact. In the past few days they've begun to penalise it even more. I saw a website for web design in my area (and about 15,000 others) drop from page 1 of Google to nowhere (I looked up to page 5 before carrying on with my day). Edited March 1, 201115 yr by andyl
March 1, 201115 yr Thanks for all your advice, I think I may have sorted the centering problem. I may be out of my depth on this website design thingy, you lads really know what your doing. With regards to putting keywords in my header, are google really not keen on this? I'm getting conflicting advice on that subject. Only put my website on a couple of free business listings last night and I'm getting calls already to do a paid listing. Will see how it pans out before I go ahead. Once again thanks. Ricky, some people do put keywords on the header and this does make them score higher on google, that's why a lot of people do it. The problem is, this is a way of cheating the crawlers and once Google find out you'll be penalized. They might never find out if you're lucky but if they do then you lose all the work you had building and hosting a page because without google your customer just won't find you! Is it worth taking the gamble?
March 1, 201115 yr Google likes very clean HTML with all the important text close to the top of the code. The most important text in <h1>'s the second in <h2>'s etc... The text in the headers must also be in the page title and preferably the page url too. This is quite a good starter SEO Thingy The site looks pretty nice tho, it's just the code that will let you down. Maybe install Visual Studio 2010 and use that instead of notepad. Try not to use so much and stick your css in a separate stylesheet. Edited March 1, 201115 yr by Ben Evans
March 2, 201115 yr Thanks for all your advice, I think I may have sorted the centering problem. I may be out of my depth on this website design thingy, you lads really know what your doing. With regards to putting keywords in my header, are google really not keen on this? I'm getting conflicting advice on that subject. Only put my website on a couple of free business listings last night and I'm getting calls already to do a paid listing. Will see how it pans out before I go ahead. Once again thanks. With regards to keywords in the header are you sure you're not getting confused with header tags, i.e h1, h2 etc. Hidden text, keyword spamming behind images etc will get you penalised/possibly dropped from the serps. Edited March 2, 201115 yr by theboss
March 2, 201115 yr On another area other than coding and design I would say the layout on the “price” page is not clear enough? People like to see the details “clearly” i.e. bullet points or in a table etc Like: Students - £20 Non students - £21 Block booking – discounts available Introduce a friend - receive a half price lesson 10 lessons up front - receive a lesson free Just my 2p worth
March 2, 201115 yr Author Thanks for all your advice, gone with that bullet design for my prices looks a lot clearer now. cheers.
March 30, 201115 yr Not bad. Although I don’t really get what the Google search is all about. Your taking business away. I would also think about adding a border (left, right) as the content body looks a little strange. (Undefined)
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