Let me have to worst of it!!

**journeyoftheanimals** · 11-06-2007 09:23 PM

Hello all. I have been working on my site here and there. However sometimes you lose momentum or motivation. I am stuck in a rut at the moment and not sure what to work on. So what do you think really needs to be worked on? Give me the worst of your thoughts.

Edit***

Duhhh, helps if I include the address. JOTA HOME

**pacificalaska** · 11-06-2007 11:50 PM

(Viewing with firefox)

1) Banner in middle covers part of text.

2) 19 letter domain name is rough.
Go to Domain Search and type in "animal" or "pet"

3) If you want to advertise... To start your business, you can usually get $50 in free google or yahoo or miva search engine ads with no obligation.

4) Forums doesn't have a way out, except the back button. Clicking on the banner just refreshes the page.

5) First care sheet is a broken link.
Most care sheets open in same tab. Silkworms not. Should be consistent.

6) You have a number of messed up links. e.g. On your news page, you send a person to: http://www.journeyoftheanimals.com/j...theanimals.com
That just produces an error message.

7) Almost all your title tags say "JOTA HOME". You have to go to near the top of the html and type in a title for each page that shows when a person looks at the tabs. Since you haven't done that, you probably have not taken much thought about keywords. That is very important for search engines. Your keywords are "dog, cat, pet care, forum, pet discussion, pet information". You have to make sure each appears a few times on every page that uses that keyword.

8) You need to decide if the advertising will give you enough money to justify muddying up the site. The banner on the home page is obtrusive.

Good Luck.

**journeyoftheanimals** · 11-07-2007 12:25 AM

Thank you greatly. Thought I fixed that dang title tag mistake. Well anyways...thank you greatly for your reply and not holding anything back. I will work on those and also post again in the morning. Thank you again.

**2gould** · 11-07-2007 10:22 AM

I would get rid of the ads or find a better way to display them. The banner in the middle of the page is awkward and is one of the first things you see which, in my opinion, takes away from the site.

I would also try to find a different way to give credit to those who created the care sheets. Scrolling down all I see is "(unedited, submitted by ____)". That instantly gives me the impression that you are just re-displaying others work and did not put a lot of time into the site. I am sure that is not the case, but that is what it indicates to me. I know you want to give credit where credit is due but maybe consider putting the "credit" at the bottom of each individual care sheet instead of up front in the index.

Those are my initial thoughts and what stood out to me. I like the concept and wish you all the best.

**consumertreehouse** · 11-07-2007 03:14 PM

I think your site has potential, but there are other sites out there that offer the same thing. You need to make yours "pop" and stand out more. You need some color too, animals are full of color, not just white. You need to have something that all the other sites similar to your does not have.

**journeyoftheanimals** · 11-08-2007 01:47 AM

Originally Posted by pacificalaska

(Viewing with firefox)

1) Banner in middle covers part of text.

I have tried all I can to get that banner to work correctly with no luck. It is now gone.

2) 19 letter domain name is rough.
Go to Domain Search and type in "animal" or "pet"

When I started I was going to also buy www.jota.com but by the time I got around to buying journeyoftheanimals.com jota was already taken.

3) If you want to advertise... To start your business, you can usually get $50 in free google or yahoo or miva search engine ads with no obligation.

I will look into that, thank you.

4) Forums doesn't have a way out, except the back button. Clicking on the banner just refreshes the page.

Was thinking about trying to place the forums within another page. Sort of like a SSI (server side include) so I could add some stuff to the top and soforth without having to edit to forum code itself. Would this be pretty easy?

5) First care sheet is a broken link.
Most care sheets open in same tab. Silkworms not. Should be consistent.

Fixed the broken link, thank you. The silkworm care sheet was not written by me or anyone on my site. I also could not get ahold of the owner of the site that had that the care sheet to ask for permission to place the care sheet on my site. So in case I lost someone to another site I figured I would open it in another window. Should I change that? Oh and also listed the care sheets in order A-Z to make it look a little nicer and easier to navigate.

6) You have a number of messed up links. e.g. On your news page, you send a person to: http://www.journeyoftheanimals.com/j...theanimals.com
That just produces an error message.

Thank you. Will be trying to go through the website and work on this.

7) Almost all your title tags say "JOTA HOME". You have to go to near the top of the html and type in a title for each page that shows when a person looks at the tabs. Since you haven't done that, you probably have not taken much thought about keywords. That is very important for search engines. Your keywords are "dog, cat, pet care, forum, pet discussion, pet information". You have to make sure each appears a few times on every page that uses that keyword.

Thought I had fixed that. Will go through all the pages and double check to find the bad ones.

8) You need to decide if the advertising will give you enough money to justify muddying up the site. The banner on the home page is obtrusive.

I have tried all I can to get that banner to work correctly with no luck. It is now gone. All the ads where hosted for free right now anyways.

Good Luck.

Is there anything else anyone sees at this time?

**allysa** · 11-08-2007 05:52 AM

improve navigation especially the color and also add some hover to it. I can say that your site is very simple, I suggest to separate the background from the foreground area and make emphasize on your content by putting a background color. Play with colors, surely it will make your site better.

Lastly, do you know anything about CMS?

**rpendery2006** · 11-08-2007 06:21 AM

I agree with Allysa, definitely make a hover state for the menu buttons.

**crackah** · 11-08-2007 06:31 AM

maybe install joomla.

**NYAC** · 11-08-2007 09:05 AM

I think the site has good potential, but some redesigning must be done... I would start with the navigation as mentioned above...

**pacificalaska** · 11-08-2007 04:47 PM

You can check your links by going to: W3C Link Checker

I'm not sure how you are making pages, but you can download NVU for free.
NVU
That makes it easy to build pages.
It has ftp built in so it can send the pages right to your site.

**Nick R** · 11-08-2007 06:01 PM

I would redesign and recode your site, possibly get a decent CMS, and that is decent, not any old thing. Spend some money on ads, get a few high PR inlinks, SEO your site, get a few high traffic inlinks, if forums are considered one of the main components, get vbulletin, that will fully intergrate into your homepage and has a free CMS available along with SEO modifications that take very little work to put into effect.

**journeyoftheanimals** · 11-08-2007 10:05 PM

OK I have been thinking about the navigation too and after hearing what everyone here has said I guess it is time to redo it. I think a few people said to add some hover to it. Just a simple mouse over? Just not sure what to do on the hover, I mean I know how....just not sure what you guys think would look good.

Also, the menu is currently flash, should I change to a mapped picture instead? Or maybe bigger and better flash? Was thinking about going away from the flash incase someone shows up that does not have flash installed but then again in this day and age I would think just about everyone would have flash installed.

Well sorry for just rambling on in this post. Thank you everyone for your feedback on this.