REVIEW REQUEST: Minnesota Wedding Minister

You need something to tie the design together, while at the same time accentuating the different areas. For starters you could place a simple tile that put a lightly colored bar down the left side where your navigation sits.

Also, you shouldn't underline your subheads -- dopes like me sit there clicking on them thinking they are links.

First off, congratulations on putting it together yourself! It's a steep learning curve to get to this point, so well done.

In order to address your traffic issues, here are a few things you might want to consider:

1. test the site in different browsers to get rid of any remaining inconsistencies

2. consider using a graphic design template. for Weddings there are many linkware "sets" available that may suit your needs and start to convey what you do before someone starts reading. The barebones is good to start with, but you're going to want to polish up the design.

3. Since you have a domain name, consider securing hosting that will let you use it. This is a far more professional approach, and helps the user have confidence in your services.

4. Speaking of services... if you have some demo services, you may want to put parts of them available online so people can get an idea of what's happened in the past. I know when I got married, since it wasn't in a church (a pub!) we had a hard time finding someone who would do the marriage in the first place, and how to proceed without having the traditional bits. Some suggestions or examples would create a resource that you could market. (Also, I wish I had had a rehearsal!)

5. With a new design and a resource and a solid url, you can start to market the site to different local shops (wedding boutiques, notaries, city hall), and then pay attention to the local sections of various directories and search engines. Make sure to include your location in your keywords, as that's integral to your service.

6. To encourage people to email or call you, have your contact information much larger on every page. Include a form, a phone number, an email address, pager number, ICQ, AIM, however they can contact you. In the text, write it as if you are talking to the person on the phone -- you have a friendly style, so keep that up.

Basically I think you have a great start -- I wish more people would concentrate on getting the content and aims together before adding the finishing touches, but if wishes were horses and all that.

Best of luck with the site, I think with some more work and fine tuning you will have success!

Suzanne

A theme would go well, something weddingish as Suzanne has mentioned.

on your FAQ page the end 's' on the Commitment Ceremonies and Testimonials is linked to another link.
also the 'FAQ' and '(Frequently Asked Questions)' are two seperate links
I think you might have to many keywords in your meta tags, words like: "Minister", "Ministers" can just be the first, as if the word minister is searched for it will find ministers.
your first page (index.html) should contain a lot of your keywords, less text is sometimes good but a better description into your services/business could be better for the viewer. you just have "Member -
North American Bridal Association

Ordained in 1989

Licensed by the State of Minnesota

Open to all faiths" doesnt realy tell me what you do, maybe even add an "about me (you)" page.

another thing is you should get another email address, use your web domain name if you can, people dont take hotmail accounts very seriously

congrats and welcome

Again congratulations for a good start. Now you just need to tweak some things as others have said get a design and some colour into it and think about layout - on Testimonials you have a picture then all the text squashed to the left of it in one long column, either get some more photos or rethink that layout.

Do you have a graphics program? If so create the "Minnesota Wedding Minister and Officiant" as a graphic in a nice font & colour then put the text as the alt tag. Also maybe make the headings for each page a graphic as well to add some spice to the pages.

As far as search engine stuff this is a good thread to read through for starters.

Also ask for wedding related sites to link back to your site. Get a nice polite email asking for reciprocal linking together then search through the search engines for sites wedding related in your area and send the email out to them. It is a slow process but does pay off. If you need any help with this pm me or post in the Search Engine Challenges forum.

I am impressed with the design. Very clean and organized. Well done.

My only suggestion would be to include a font-family in the style (EX: verdana, arial) and to add colors to your links.

I don't think I have seen a rookie site put together this well before.

Oh, and also I would suggest downloading a text editor like Textpad, Yahoo's web builder limits your ability to do things (I'm guessing?)

I agree that you're lacking a theme. I don't think I'll dwell on that any further.

Typos
* Do you require premarital counseling?

* If you have Acrobat Reader installed ...

* A blood test is not required in the state of Minnesota.

* ... Minneapolis, MN 55402 .

I didn't look for any more errors. Just run the text through a spell checker or proofread it once more.

Your design is nice and simple. Don't lose that when changing it.

"I am impressed with the design. Very clean and organized. Well done."

"Your design is nice and simple."

Am I missing something or are y'all being a little too reverant to the good father?

Whatever the profession, a business site is a business site and requires good informative content presented in a well organized and visually appealing manner.

I would be doing you a disservice being anything other than blunt...

Design:

What I'm seeing here is basically default fonts and colours for the most part. It is a very naked site with no aesthetic value really. You need an appropriate and consistent theme.

Structure:

There are various erroneous links and huge blocks of empty space between the content and the footers. I see that you used some sort of online pagebuilder for this and frankly, the bloated (and probably error-ridden) code reflects that.

Bad links -
Main --> Commitment Ceremonies
FAQ --> (Frequently Asked Questions)

Content:

Generally pretty thin. With the exception of FAQ and Testimonials, I count 20 words per page. Much of your "FAQ" content would actually be better placed elsewhere throughout the site. Your mailing address is buried at the bottom of that page. I would suggest a "Contact" page.

All the above observed through IE6. In NN4, ouch! something seriously wrong with the code somewhere. On FAQ, the page content underwrites the photo, overwrites the footer, and is all bold face.

Frankly, I would recommend going back to the drawing board. Surf through other sites and try to pick up elements of style and presentation. Read through the numerous helpful threads on this board and others like it.

Good luck!

Now taff, I don't think any one should expect an IDN Fresh Conference winner here on the first attempt. And I do believe that following my suggestions would give him a nice site. I don't think he should go "back to the drawing board" with the design at all. I would, however agree that it needs to be re-coded.

Here is a link for the current standards http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/ you will have to do some research for older browser (in my opinion, I wouldn't worry about it)

Here is a mock up I did that includes the styles and color's I suggested.

http://www.nicora.com/TWF/rev.html

[I still say, good work]

The quickest, simplest and most affordable way to get a more professional looking site would be to purchase a template from http://www.templatespro.com and just add your content. (If anyone here knows where to get better looking templates pls. let me know)

You might want to get a very affordable but very professional looking logo designed: http://www.logo-design-logo-design.com/

Good luck.

Quote: Originally posted by nicora
I don't think he should go "back to the drawing board" with the design at all.

Ok, I was a tad crusty this morning. You can always tell my "pre-coffee" posts

I still maintain that there really is no design so the drawing board isn't that far away.

I can relate to the "pre-coffee" feeling, lol.

I still don't think that there is anything is wrong with the design, a few clutch graphics and table colors would bring out the sound architecture.

I think Tomkin has done a good effort for his first site considering a lot of people go for all the bells and whistles, his approach is that of a good one - clean and simple. (would stay away from yahoo web builder)
when people want to get married, they want minimum fuss, less to do as possible, and this site reflects this, but probably to little.
things like a banner/logo or even some boxing wouldnt hurt. as for buying a layout, I think that is unneeded as the layout is just off target with being a little to simple.

any thoughts so far Tomkin

I agree that there really isn't much need to go spending money on templates and logos. Just some rethinking on the layout and a simple logo ina nice font will improve the site but keep it clean & simple.

This is amazing! What a great group. I tell you, a person can only go so far on their own, no matter how much they research. What a great online community. It's funny, I planned the site as much as I could ahead of time, (then re-worked it over and over again, of course), but looking back, I wish that I knew then what I know now! Oh well, we do the best we can.

Before I built the website, most of my business was word of mouth, and I thought of the site as merely a spot where my current couples could get more information. However, I was able to list with a lot of referral agencies and search engines, and now the purpose of the site has changed to getting new viewers to call me to be new clients. This goal is totally different than my first one!

So, while I started out with a free geocities address and a free hotmail account, I've quickly outgrown both. SO - while I've fixed some of the easier mistakes (thank you!!!) now I need to make the larger achitectural changes people have suggested. I've been thinking about the problem, and my current thought is to:

1. Buy a simple, classy, beautiful template. I'd like to keep the black text on the white background, with blue links changing to red (ala Roger Black - yeah, I know many people think he's outdated, but as a beginner I'm sticking to the principle of KISS). I can design the site using FrontPage and then load it onto the Geocities site. I've been surfing, and I don't suppose anyone knows of a particular template offhand, but, of course, if anyone HAPPENED to know of a perfect one, I would certainly be interested! : )

2. I definitely need to get a new email address with a new domain. The hotmail account is quickly becoming filled with spam, for one thing.

3. I should create a mirror site on minnesotaweddingminister.com, so I don't need to link to my old geocities site. Slowly, I can add or change my address to the more appropriate url on search engines and referral services. I also have mnminister.com, minnesotaminister.com and mnweddingminister.com, but I find those urls to be confusing, even if they are shorter. All the simple, easy to remember urls seem to be taken.

3. I'm leery about buying or creating a title for the site, since graphics often load so slowly. Approximately 10% of my clients are viewing the site from home on 56K modems, and in their case, I want my title text to load first, (in the interest of having people know what the site is about as quickly as possible). Maybe I can find a commonly used, beautiful font for the title. Any ideas?

4. I'm also leery about adding more text to the simpler pages, in keeping with Black's theory of 40 words/page being the optimum. I find that many of my clients just glance through the pages before calling me. Only a few of them really dig into the information, and that's why I created the text-heavy FAQ. Is the FAQ too big?

5. I want to add more pictures, but that's slow-going, as very few clients want their pictures on the net. More pictures is definitely my long-term goal, though. What do people think - should I include pictures of things other than past clients? (Wedding rings, flowers, etc.) I'm not sure it's worth the bandwidth to show images that aren't of my actual past clients, but maybe the visual appeal of them would be worth it. What are your opinions?

If anyone has more ideas or comments, I'd love to hear them! I just wanted to give some feedback about what I'm thinking...wow, what a great group.

Best templates on the web: http://www.templatespro.com

you concern for bandwidth etc is a good one but you can go up to and sometimes over 40kb per page before suffering delays. if you want to add more pictures make use of thumbnails (smaller pictures you click to see fill size). also the 40 word max thing doesnt sound quite right, to little text have be worse than to much. when writing, add a summary type paragraph at top, then add the details etc in the following paragraphs, if people are at your site they are there for a reason and want information. The KISS is a good thing to work by, but again to simple can be worse than to busy.
There is a lot of info on the web, some good, some bad, some just down right confusing, read around and take what you think is best or comparer to what you see on the web, I bet the articel about 40 words per page didnt have just 40 words on it. YOur selling a service so you need to get them interested, you need to sell yourself, if you can do this in 40 words then great but work on a message you want to get across rather than the limit.

Pictures/graphics make instant appeal and help to give sites an identity, the same with a graphical logo/header. Done right neither photos or graphics will slow the site down too much and if a site is nice to look at straight away then visitors are more likely to stick around. If you can't code your own then a template should be a good way to get an interesting site design/layout.

Using the domain minessotaweddingminister.com will help with the search engines as you have your main keywords in the name, make sure that you follow that with a good title of up to 6 words, about a 15 word meta description that will grab attention in the SE's results listing and a good first line of text on the index page (this is what google uses as it's result listing) all containing your main keywords.

I'd change the photos myself. Find a good looking bride in a close up. Rude as it may sound, it's true, people wanna see nice looking people. The pictures are grainy and too far away for anyone to 'capture the moment'. I would think what you are selling is a lifetime memory so the photos should make that kind of impression..

Or.......... I'm an idiot and missed the whole point of your website.