DougWead.com — A web design audit

1William Bryant • 20th Apr 2009 • Internet Marketing, News, technology

Glen Woodfin (@glenwoodfin) asked me to take a look at certain things on dougwead.com. Mainly pertaining to links and such, so I wanted to do a quick audit for him. I’m posting the results so that other programmers and web designers can see some very simple faults in building a web site, how devestating they can be on the web site, and how simply they can be fixed. Read on to get the full story…

He asked me first of all about the footer links, so let’s look at those first. The question was about the links in the footer and how they are linked to php pages. The links look something like this: http://www.dougwead.com/index.php?page=videos

This isn’t really a problem, as those are actually static pages. Google will recognize the link, crawl and index it. These type links are typically used when you have a lot of pages that need the same or similar content, and you can pass keywords or commands through the ?page=XYZ command. I’ve done this on several sites myself. The problem comes in when the commands being passed aren’t needed (excessively compliated coding) or when the commands being used aren’t keyword relevant. At least make them keyword relevant, or don’t use them! So the verdit is in this case, the links at the top still link to regular .htm pages so just use those, don’t overcomplicate the site!

I noticed another BIG problem. None of the pictures on the site (and the site uses a lot of pictures) use the alt=”some text” functionality in the images. This is basic web design 101, and these guys missed it. Basically what this means is, when Google goes to crawl the page, and it sees a bunch of images, it can’t see what’s on the image. It just sees an image as “<img src=”img.jpg”> and that’s it. What’s the image about? that’s what the “alt” tag is for, it tells the search engine what that image is for.

So if you have a bunch of images without alt tags, it looks like a blank sheet of paper to Google. What good does that do you (especially if you use  alot of images)? None what so ever, it really hurts you.

Which brings me to my next point, the fact that the menu bar is all images and javascript rollover. Which 4 or 5 years ago was great! And it does look great. But now the same thing can be achieved in CSS. The advantage? Cleaner code, more cross-browser compatibility, and way better search engine ability to crawl the code and follow links. So if you find yourself using your main menu links as rollover javascript images (especially without alt tags), STOP! Just use CSS my friend, it’s really not that hard. And hey, everybody’s doing it

Those were the main flaws I saw with the site, overall it’s a nice site; anyone else have any suggestions? Write them in the comments and let’s see how it could be better improved!