My First Wordpress Site - Opinions Please

Lostinspace

Hi, I recently completed my first Wordpress website. I generally use Joomla but decided to give Wordpress a go. You can view it here. I'd like to get your opinions please. Thank you

Vurnon San Benito

Very very good start.

Lostinspace

Thanks Doocey. There are one or two things I need to add like a newsletter signup form but I'm working on that. It's proving quite difficult though.

Tim M-U

Fine site! Well done and good luck!
To help your SEO and an easier understanding of url's, you should have fiendly url's, for example http://example.com/?#8398123-48713 could be http://example.com/home etc. I looked in the web.archive.org and it is alot better!

Well done!:D

Axwell

Yeah for SEO in Wordpress change your permalinks, you will be able to read about them if you do a google search. That will make your urls search engine friendly and change www.whatever.com/?1234.php to www.whatever.com/contact etc

flashforward

Nice site.

One point id note is that your first 2 pictures on your rotator dont really get across what the site is about;
Pictures 3-4-5 show your product in use or just in view and in my opinion id move them to the first 3.

On another note, I use joomla aswel and never used wordpress.
How did you find the transition between the two? which do you find better?

Lostinspace

Thanks for your replies. Tim and Axwell, I changed the Permalinks as advised. Thanks for that. I changed them there as per this blog:

http://millionclues.com/blogosphere/wordpress-blogosphere/wordpress-optimization/optimize-wordpress-permalinks-seo-friendly/

I'm just wondering is there much else I can do in relation to SEO? I've set up a blog which is obviously very important. I've put in meta tags and a description for each page and post and warned the client to do that for any future pages they add. I downloaded the All in One SEO and installed that. I want them to link to the sites on their portfolio page and get those sites to link to future homes (just to build traffic). Is there anything else I should be doing in order to add SEO value?

Flashforward
Ya I've been working on Joomla quite a bit. The most recent site I did was for the local hurling club. That took me quite a while to make. I guess I was just getting the hang of Joomla as well and did a lot of messing around with various extensions. I find it quite difficult sometimes to install some of the extensions with Joomla whereas the Plugins for Wordpress appear to be much easier to install. The instructions are there in black and white. I think Wordpress templates are far nicer to look at as well. You can tell a Joomla site from a distance! I think I'll start using Wordpress a bit more from now on, just to see how it goes.

Axwell

The permalink for your services page isnt right. Log in to the admin section and go to the page for services and at the top you will see the permalink, you need to edit it there as there was another services page at some point when you were making the site and the current one got called services-2.

As regards SEO your page titles could have more in them to help with SEO. For example Future Homes | Home Automation |Home Control Systems | Home Cinema Systems

Same goes for the keywords you have used. You use hardly any keywords that are actually associated with what the company does. You want keywords that you think people are going to put into Google when searching for this kind of business and dont have a specific company in mind they are searching for.

Also didnt check if you had it or not but add Google Analytics if you havent so you can keep track of traffic and how people found the site and the keywords they used etc to help with ongoing improvements.

Lostinspace

Thanks Axwell. I tried to change the services-2 earlier but it wouldn't update for me. However, I just found a services page in the trash folder and deleted it now so all is working fine there.

In relation to adding more information to the page titles, are you referring to the the actual page title or the page URL? For example, on this page the title is Smart Lighting | Future Homes whereas the URL title is ...services/smart-lighting. I presume you're referring to the former?

In relation to the keywords. Take the Smart Lighting page for example. I have inputted the following keywords for that page:

"smarthomes, lighting, system, smart lighting, bedside, control, secure, lights, cork, futurehomes, future homes"

Do you really think that these keywords don't reflect what the company does? I don't want to put in too many keywords either. 10 or 11 is enough I think. I installed Google Analytics the other day and that will help should the company wish to take out an Adwords campaign in a couple of months. I appreciate the advice Axwell. Thanks again

Axwell

Im referring to the page title not the page url.

Those keywords are fine but I would make sure they are like that for each specific page with individual keywords for that specific page dealing with the content. I havent gone through all the pages and looked at the source so its just a general comment of advice than me picking on any specific page or details.

Lostinspace

No problem at all. I'll make a few changes in the coming days. I guess the most important thing I've learned is in relation to the Permalinks. I wouldn't have even thought of it.

Thanks again Axwell.