16 replies to this topic

[Bob Collett]

My site is hellocallingcards .com

General
Is this site completed or under construction? Completed

If completed:
How long has the site been up? The site has been operating for more than 5 years.

SEO
Do you have incoming links? Yes. More than 1000

What keywords are you targeting? International phone cards, philippines phone cards, ukraine phone cards, india phone card, international calling cards.

Do you want your code reviewed for errors or improvements? Yes, of course I want recommendations for improvement. My site has hundreds of "errors" when I run it through a validator. I think it comes from using some wysiwyg editors at one time or another, but I am not sure... Also not sure how to fix all of the errors, because I do not want to take a chance to kill the functionality. I am not the original ASP developer for the site. He is not available.

Marketing
Who is your target audience? My audience is the Foreign Born American, who is likely to want to buy a prepaid international phone card to call home from the USA. The most important ehnicities for my site (based upon current customers) are Philippinos, Eastern Europeans, and Africans. I can target almost any country and make it profitable, if sucessful.



Why is your site different from sites selling/offering similar info/goods/services? Why will someone want to do business you?
People like our site because it is easy to use, we post our phone number and answer the phone. I try to find the best product for each of our customers and take care of them when there is a problem.

How important is usability? Usability is very important.

What is the purpose of the site? (inform, sell, online community, support B&M business, contact info only, etc) My purpose is to sell phone cards, although I also have an interest in providing valuable information.

Design
Do you want design suggestions? Yes, of course. Any kind of suggestions will be appreciated.


thank you.
Bob

[lisety]

Maybe it was just my computer but I waited 20 seconds and your home page still hadn't loaded. I didn't hang around, sorry.

[don h]

As lisety pointed out the site took forever to load. Who hosts your website? It seems to be the server that's causing the high load time -- not a network issue.

I think it looks good overall, eloquent design, lots of information, keyword rich.

I don't think those errors you mentioned are going to affect your SERP, the page looks fine text only. It's ok to have validation errors, lots of sites do.

[Bob Collett]

Maybe it was just my computer but I waited 20 seconds and your home page still hadn't loaded. I didn't hang around, sorry.

Thanks for the input. The home page has a lot of images. I will work on the size. Perhaps this is hurting my bounce rate and conversions.

How many seconds do you think is acceptable.

[lisety]

I think 10 seconds is the accepted max. I try to keep all my pages beneath that if possible...but definitely the home page should be below that. Some of my inner pages are larger but by then hopefully they're hooked:-)

[don h]

It isn't the images causing the delay. Your web server didn't respond at all for atleast 20 seconds. In other words, the server didn't start sending any text or images for that entire period.

[Bob Collett]

It isn't the images causing the delay. Your web server didn't respond at all for atleast 20 seconds. In other words, the server didn't start sending any text or images for that entire period.

I am perplexed by this. I did do some image compression, but when I test using pingdom.com it shows a load time of less than 7 seconds (It was showing 12 seconds before I did the compression). But either way, this is not consistent with what you both experienced.

When I load from my browser, it loads instantly.

Thanks

[don h]

Well it appears to be better now, but last night was pretty bad. I think it may have been caused by high load perhaps by other programs running. Do you have certain tasks set to run at a scheduled time during the late night hours?

[madams]

Loads quick for me Bob

If you are testing on you pc it is always best to clear cache first.

That way you get a true speed test.

Site looks great to me. A lot of space on the right hand side though but I guess thats my monitor.

[ozaark]

Site loads slow for me too... it seems like it's the server you are on. Quick run through Octagate Site Timer shows it stalls out for about 10+ seconds after initial hit. The server might be doing this at random but it's definitely happening often if only 4 people have checked it and 3 of them are feeling the lag.

I'd be more willing to browse through it and give a more thorough review if I could browse faster on it.

[Bob Collett]

Site loads slow for me too... it seems like it's the server you are on. Quick run through Octagate Site Timer shows it stalls out for about 10+ seconds after initial hit. The server might be doing this at random but it's definitely happening often if only 4 people have checked it and 3 of them are feeling the lag.

I'd be more willing to browse through it and give a more thorough review if I could browse faster on it.

It sure seems to be the case. Perhaps I need to bring in a faster server. I sure hope I don't have some virus consuming resources. Thanks for the input.

[don h]

Personally, I'd never trust Windows to run any of my sites. Linux and other types of UNIX OSs aren't that hard to learn and use, and CPanel makes hosting on Linux a breeze.

[BBCoach]

Nice site design. I could find what I wanted and the path to checking out was fine. Also, the speed of the site was acceptable (loaded in < 7 seconds), but I'm on a 10 gig fiber line.

I noticed that the site is programmed in classic ASP. If you believe there are slow downs, then in ASP I would strongly encourage you to use arrays when retrieving data for displaying info from a database. Syntax is arPhoneCards = myrecordset.GetRows(). That creates a 2 diminsional array. The first diminsion contains the colums returned and the second the record pointer. So lets say a query to the database returns 5 records having 3 columns each. Then use a FOR loop to extract the data like:

For i = 0 to UBound(arPhoneCards,2)
response.write "Country - " & arPhoneCards(1,i) & "<br>"
response.write "City - " & arPhoneCards(2,i) & "<br>"
response.write "Cost - " & arPhoneCards(3,i) & "<br>"
Next

I haven't ran into any kind a limit using GetRows(). I've retrieved recordsets as large as 500,000 records with 10+ columns and haven't had a single issue. Arrays ROCK in performance! I've had to fix more sites where programmers used in-line SQL and recordsets instead of arrays than I want to count. It is the single largest reason for poor ASP performance. If you're pulling the country listing from the dB, then this would improve performance 1000%.

Oh. Got side tracked. You want to know some SEO stuff. First, spell US and not Us in your page titles. Second and last, the individual product pages when drilled down to don't have unique titles they're all "HelloCallingCards.com - International Calling Cards." I would think that "African Nights Calling Card - International Calling Cards" should be in the title of that page when I'm looking at that product. Especially, considering how much weight a title tag carries in SEs. It would also help someone zero in on your site in the SERPS because African calling card would be in the title of the page. Hope that helps. Good luck!

[Bob Collett]

Nice site design. I could find what I wanted and the path to checking out was fine. Also, the speed of the site was acceptable (loaded in < 7 seconds), but I'm on a 10 gig fiber line.

I noticed that the site is programmed in classic ASP. If you believe there are slow downs, then in ASP I would strongly encourage you to use arrays when retrieving data for displaying info from a database. Syntax is arPhoneCards = myrecordset.GetRows(). That creates a 2 diminsional array. The first diminsion contains the colums returned and the second the record pointer. So lets say a query to the database returns 5 records having 3 columns each. Then use a FOR loop to extract the data like:

For i = 0 to UBound(arPhoneCards,2)
response.write "Country - " & arPhoneCards(1,i) & "<br>"
response.write "City - " & arPhoneCards(2,i) & "<br>"
response.write "Cost - " & arPhoneCards(3,i) & "<br>"
Next

I haven't ran into any kind a limit using GetRows(). I've retrieved recordsets as large as 500,000 records with 10+ columns and haven't had a single issue. Arrays ROCK in performance! I've had to fix more sites where programmers used in-line SQL and recordsets instead of arrays than I want to count. It is the single largest reason for poor ASP performance. If you're pulling the country listing from the dB, then this would improve performance 1000%.

Oh. Got side tracked. You want to know some SEO stuff. First, spell US and not Us in your page titles. Second and last, the individual product pages when drilled down to don't have unique titles they're all "HelloCallingCards.com - International Calling Cards." I would think that "African Nights Calling Card - International Calling Cards" should be in the title of that page when I'm looking at that product. Especially, considering how much weight a title tag carries in SEs. It would also help someone zero in on your site in the SERPS because African calling card would be in the title of the page. Hope that helps. Good luck!

That was a great suggestion. I have so many pages for every phone card and every country, that I totally missed the redundant titles on the phone card pages. Fortunately, these are dynamically generated, so it was fairly easy to add the specific product name to my pages with one line of code. Thanks.

I am not sure what "spell US and not Us" means... or where you saw this.

[BBCoach]

That was a great suggestion. I have so many pages for every phone card and every country, that I totally missed the redundant titles on the phone card pages. Fortunately, these are dynamically generated, so it was fairly easy to add the specific product name to my pages with one line of code. Thanks.

I am not sure what "spell US and not Us" means... or where you saw this.

There were several page titles that spelled US like Us. Two different meanings.