Website Review - Small Business Ideas

March 1st, 2008 · 4 Comments

Heart Harmony Logo This week’s site review is the website of the week at Blog Whammy ….

website : Small Business Ideas / Heart Harmony
url : shttp://www.heartharmony.com.au/IngridCliffBlog.html

This site is written by Ingrid Cliff, the owner of Heart Harmony - a human resource management consultant and freelance copywriter .

suggestions for change :

The photo and details about who you are are warm and inviting. I would suggest that you add details about how to contact you on the blog - don’t rely on them clicking on the link to the website for them to find out more about you.
Consider moving from a separate website and Blogger-hosted blog to a combined site on platform such as Wordpress. At the moment any traffic and link love that you blog is getting is not providing the same level of SEO (search engine optmisation) to your webiste. If they are combined into a single platform then there is common branding and common traffic targetting which should result in improved page rank on Google and overall traffic ranking on other sites.
Fix the problems that are stopping the site from validating (why validate?)
The RSS Feed links should have a more user friendly description like “Subscribe to RSS Updates” rather than fees and the option to “Subscribe to Email Updates should also be provided” (Feedburner can help you with this and with managing all aspects of the feeds and subscriptions to your blog).
Seeing that make sure that you carefully the site, have backups of the data, and be aware of some of the problems that Blogger-hosted blogs have give to others. When your blog is an integral part of your business marketing then you need to use a blog platform that is under your control and is predictable and reliable.
This is possibly just a personal preference but I believe that the “tweets” break the flow of some strong content-based posts. I’ve also found that many small business owners are not aware what Twitter is and these tweets maybe a little confusing for some and distracting for others.

Ingrid’s tips for small business owners in managing their staff and business are a godsend for those of us who don’t have our own HR departments. Keep up the great work Ingrid.

If you have any feedback on the site or questions about what I’ve had to say then just join the conversation in the comments.

Tags: Build a Better Website · Reviews · Tips & Techniques

4 responses so far ↓

1 Helena Denley // Mar 1, 2008 at 4:16 pm

Hi,

Just a question, how vital is it for blogs to validate? I read the info in the link you gave, and take that on board and I’ve noticed that the blogger blog I inserted into a site I did (http://www.solarbody.com.au) doesn’t validate (and the remainder of the site does). I haven’t worked out how to make other people’s code (e.g from Blogger, iContact forms etc) validate.

And in reference to the above site you’ve reviewed - the blogger code can be inserted into the main site - haven’t tried it with Wordpress yet.

Cheers

Helena
2 Ingrid Cliff // Mar 3, 2008 at 8:37 am

Thank you for you well considered review! I will certainly take them on board and do some tweaking of my blog.

Cheers
Ingrid
3 Leah // Mar 11, 2008 at 5:22 am

@Helena - I believe that it is vital for all web pages to validate, whether they be from traditional sites or blogs. Validation helps ensure the consistency of viewing across various platforms and browsers. It is the step that says “yes this page has been designed with the best practice standards”. Just as with any industry standards are there to help provide consistency and professionalism.

Unfortuantely you can’t always make someone else’s code valid. It is like taking an apple that was grown on a farm that sprays with chemicals and trying to make it organic. It is always best to start from a base that is standards compliant and work from there.

For a lengthier explanation on why a page/site should be validated then check out this page from the World Wide Web Consortium (the standards body) http://validator.w3.org/docs/why.html

With Solarbody noticed in the validation report that some of the errors can be fixed by changing the doctype. Currently on this site it is set to “XHTML 1.0 Strict” but the “XHTML 1.0 Transitional” option would be better for this site.

I hope this answers your question.
4 Leah // Mar 11, 2008 at 5:24 am

@Ingrid - It was my pleasure. Looking forward to seeing the result of your tweaking.