G'day All, Although I am somewhat happy with the visual layout of my companies website, I am continually told that my site looks outdated, the technology used is outdated, the site has not been set up to maximise SEO, there is too much Javascript, there is an overuse and misuse of different platforms etc. The site is developed by quite a large IT company, and we pay quite high rates to have them develop it, so it is somewhat dissapointing to hear people say that the site is quite dated and not developed properly. Anyway, I want to go back to the IT company, and tell them that I am a little dissapointed, and give them some examples as to why the site is dated and not developed properly, and I am hoping that some of you kind people, might be able to take a look at the site, and tell me exactly what is wrong with it, either from a HTML, design, SEO or whatever point of view. The site is www.australianracingboard.com.au Cheers Jake
Hi Jake, I think it's good you are getting a second opinion. You seem to want to get to the bottom of this so I will give you my honest opinion, having been a webmaster of a popular site for over 10 years. I do find your site very dated and difficult to understand. The layout is awkward and not user-friendly. I get "1998" - not "2009" from the design. That's how outdated it appears. The site is designed in old fashioned tables and considering how complex the site is in terms of layout, this is a bad thing. I found it extremely SLOW (even opening the source code was slow). The text is rather small in places and this is a big turn off for a lot of people. The SEO is quite poor with not even some of the basics being used. Sorry to sound blunt but I want you to know the truth so you can take the appropriate action. I hope you are charging your design company for that link at the bottom? Are they paying you for advertising their link on your site?
It's not that bad, I'm not a big fan of those bevelled green box header bits, they do look a bit old fashioned. Having said that it is a site about horse racing so you wouldn't expect it to look ultra modern like a Sony site anyway. There is a lot of javascript, but then there is a level of live data fed into it, again what you might expect for a racing site. I personally wouldn't use javascript for the menus though. Also there's a lot of script actually in the page where it might be better off in its own file. A lot of the title are a bit wasted only being like this: <td class="marqueeTop">Racing News</td> when they should be like this: <h2>Racing News</h2> or <h3> etc, which would be better for SEO. Also the meta tags are a bit iffy. That's only from a quick two minute look though, I haven't delved into what the site actually does or anything.
The bottom line is it can be improved A LOT and if he paid a very high price and got ripped off, it needs to be sorted. Jake, if you are serious about the site, get it fixed if you can. You will benefit from happier (and more frequent) visitors.
Hi, You can change title of your website, you have to put best keywords on your website title, it should be use for getting good ranking in search engines - Jessica Danial Website Design Services
In my opinion, while it doesn't look *bad*, it doesn't look as professional as most gambling and racing sites i have visited in the past. The header in particular is screaming for some kind of modern makeover. The positioning of the text by the logo is really awkward to me and i feel like the little logos you have below it could be larger and better positioned somewhere else on the site. The actual content boxes are quite nicely done, though there does seen to be very little spacing between anything in them. I think the links in the 'This Weeks Racing' box could be styled better as well. The navigation bar, in the grey colour, also seems a little bit out of date and cumbersome. I don't really like it's boxyness. All in all, from what I can see (i don't do code so i'm speaking design-only) it does look ok and I would happily use it, but i think it could look so much better by improving the header and navigation bar and cleaning up the content areas a little bit. Small changes can make a large difference!