Project 2: Site Makeover
Biscuit Recipes is a website dedicated to… biscuit recipes! The website features a number of recipes, an online shop, some cooking tips, a forum and a blog.
During this project I will critically assess the current site, and then re-design the homepage (using the same content), making improvements to the design and branding in an attempt to improve SEO and the popularity of the site.
Page Rank: 3/10 (PR Checker, 05/12/2010)
Site Traffic: 216 per day (Statbrain, 05/12/2010)
Demographic: Mainly females, aged 25-34 (Alexa, 05/12/2010)
Sites Linking In: 4 (Alexa, 05/12/2010)
#1 Search Query: “biscuit recipe” (Alexa, 05/12/2010)
Business
The Biscuit Recipes site seems to have two main revenue streams. The first is advertising – the homepage features both Google Ads and an Amazon Ads. These are both pay-per-click schemes, so improving Biscuit Recipe’s site traffic may be financially beneficial. The second is the Online Store which is actually an Amazon aStore for Amazon associates, which pays money per referral.
Commodity
The site features an online store – an embedded Amazon aStore featuring a collection of biscuit recipe books. This is a good idea because visitors browsing this site are likely to be interested in biscuit recipe books, and the site owner will be paid by Amazon for referrals. The site also features a forum, but it has only ever had less than 5 posts and these were made in 2008 so there isn’t really much a community. It would probably be better to remove the forum altogether.
The main navigation features a link to a blog by the owner of the site, but this hasn’t been updated since 2007 so I would recommend this also be removed, or updated much more frequently with new recipes or biscuit baking related tips!
Usability wise, the site is not too bad. The recipes are easy to find on the homepage, however a search facility would be beneficial and the information architecture needs a complete overhaul.
Firmness
The Biscuit Recipes site has been built using XHTML 1.0 Strict, CSS and Javascript. Bravenet Web Tools hosts the forum and the blog is powered by Blogger.
There appears to be quite a few errors in the markup according to the W3C Markup Validator. The validator was not able to determine the parse mode – meaning that browsers may interpret the document incorrectly, and the doctype has not been correctly specified.
There are several alt tags missing from the images and there are two html closing tags. I also noticed that different pages on the site lead to different blogs (unintentionally I presume).
Delight
The current Biscuit Recipes design (07/12/2010)
At the moment, the design is incredibly simple and a little uninspiring. One of the main problems seems to be that the design does not match the identity of the site. First impressions tell you that you might have arrived at the wrong page… there are no graphics or photographs of biscuits/cooking/baking and the monochromatic blue colour scheme is not necessarily appropriate for a recipe site.
It does not appear that any form of structural grid has been used to determine the layout and the padding and spacing is inconsistent throughout.
The navigation bar looks as though it is broken, with unnecessary spacing between each button and there are 8 buttons which may be slightly too many for a main navigation (another information architecture issue). Another issue I noticed is that the forum and the blog are hosted externally; they are designed differently and as such fail to identify with the main site. There is a general lack of cohesion throughout the site that needs to be addressed.
Search Engine Optimisation
100% of visitors came to biscuit-recipes.co.uk using www.google.co.uk – so SEO is extremely important. I plan to help improve SEO by:
- Use correctly formatted URLs. At the moment the pages are named using underscores to separate the words. Search engines do not interpret underscores as spaces so re-naming the pages using hyphens will help users to find the site.
- Writing concise meta descriptions within the markup.
- Include alt and title attributes on each image on the website. Alt tags help by describing the content of the images to the search engines.
- Optimising page titles: Including the site name and important key words.
The Re-Design
I have started to sketch out some ideas… and I will bring these to class with me! :-)