SITE REVIEW: Surf Directions

Hi. My name is Dan and I am the admin of the website Surf Directions . This website was created by a web design company and then modified by me.

No, it does not have anything to do with surfing. Actually, it is a 'Top of the web' type website. It is divided into several categories, where I have added the best websites I could find on the web. A nice addition to this scheme is that visitors can submit websites they liked and also, the websites are sorted by visitors' votes.

I would love to hear from you regarding the design/SEO and most of all, the idea of the website.

PS: If you have a website that you think would fit in my list, please PM me (free content and good quality is a must)

The design is good, altough i'm not an orange fan! regarding seo..i think it would help if you implement friendly urls

Unfortunately my website is hosted on Yahoo! Web Hosting and they don't support friendly urls Bummer!

My first reaction was a good one, the site pleases me.
My second reaction was that there was an almost naked chick on the page.
I realized after less than a second (split second reaction, you understand) that this is an advertisement.
Even as an ad, a half naked girl on any site doesn't look serious.
So, that was my second reaction.

Onto my third...
I really like the little floating letter dudes.

That's it.
I'd love to be added to your site but I don't think you have a category for my site.

Good luck, I think it will work.
Just get rid of the girl.

I on the other hand don't like those floating letters again ... it bothers me ... and with that the text is un-selectable and is really bad for SEO ...

Here is the code to remove that IE6 thing "click to activate and use this control" ...


Then the W3C validator found 36 errors in your coding ... click here to see them ... please note that these are on the "home" page alone ... and you should check the others yourself at http://validator.w3.org ...

I think you should disable the link of the page that a user is on, for example if a user is on the "home" page, then disable the "home" link and make it another colour (or rollover state) ... this way, users don't redirect to the page that they are on, and they always know where they are ...

I think it'd also be cool if you added rollovers to the left hand side menu you've got there ...

Then in IE6 I cannot see the advertisement on the right hand side ... I can see the heading that says "Advertisement" but nothing beneath it ... And I get the "Done, but with errors on page" status at the bottom of my browser ...

The submit page doesn't check for errors properly ... I entered a website there with url="ff" and it didn't complain about it ... I think you should check for that otherwise you're going to get more junk data like that ... and in IE6 the submit button doesn't always work ...

I the ran a search of your site with the keyword being "dali" ... My result was a blank page ... What's up with that? I then ran another search with the word "tomatoes" ... I then got a new page with the following: "Search, <textbox>, Search button" ... I then typed in tomatoes in that textbox and hit the search button ... I got the same page again ... I have this slight idea that the search function doesn't work properly yet ...

I think on the contact page you should either make the email addresses links or make a contact form for users to send you an email ...

Thanks for the replies

Unfortunately it will be pretty hard for me to work around those errors, since I will have to talk to the web design company and explain them what's what.

Cheers!

have to agree, the letters look cool but take away my attention from the site, also what do those letters do for your SEO?

Nothing ... The whole thing is in flash ...

Nice clean & simple site, I have to agree that the flashy letters take my attention from the content though.

Good job!

You should remove those flash letters.
A whole site in Flash isn't a good idea.. it makes good SEO impossible and makes your pages slow to load.

I have worked on the site a lot so I though I should bump the thread so you can tell me what you think about the changes

Ok, here are the updates I made to it:

-removed some URL's from AdSense which I did not like (the naked chick included)

-worked on the invalid HTML mark-ups for 36 down to 12 (out of which 7 are because of the Google search box code, which I cannot alter)

-embed the Flash animations using R_Ts' Java trick, and they now work fine with IE

-replaced my search (which was rubbish) with a Google search box. Right now, it is a web-search only, because the web+my site one did not display correctly. Will change it as soon as I can make it display as it should

-added alt tags to the images

-fixed some display bugs that appeared in either Firefox or IE

Right now, I am working on implementing discussion thread for Disqus . I am hoping that will determine more people to leave comments on the websites.

So, what do you think?

*darn*
your site is hard to see with both the eyes closed.

I really tried to see your page with closed eyes but it was impossible. damn. Irritating. =S

anyway.

Girls is good for your page (as long as they are good looking) they make horny geeks come back over and over again.

I submited my site to your directory, youst for fun half serriose.
The signup was really simple.

The letters gives your page a speciall touch, but I dont belive older people like that. Even I gets a bit irritated on it.