Webmaster Forum - View Single Post - Redesign leads to less traffic, leads to redesign

dewebsign · 04-29-2004, 02:10 PM

I was hired by a slate manufacturer to redesign his site back in October. He had designed a site with Yahoo pagemaker and was unable to position text without over-writing pictures and when I looked at the code it was a mess, with body tags ending the page before the page even started and other coding errors.

One thing I found annoying about his original site was the navigation. You could get to any page from the home page, but once you visited a page there were only 3 choices, home, back and next. The 7 pages were set up in a loop all with the same home, back and next, with only these three links out of each.

Site redesign was done in January. Site looks pretty. Each page looks the same, Navigation is fully meshed for easy use. Still 7 pages. Most of the text stayed the same. http://www.usedslate.com

For nearly 3 months traffic stayed the same or increased from the old site's numbers. The requests for information were at an all time high.

Mid-March Traffic plummeted. Traffic from Google, nearly stopped. Requests for information went down and nearly stopped. After March 19, for almost a week, there were NO requests for information which was down from an average of 35 weekly for the previous month. The customer realized something was up and emailed me in a panic when his site could no longer be found on google. It had been coming up in the top 5 for 18 keywords. Now it was not in the top 3 pages!

I checked, and the site was still indexed in google, just not ranking. I suggested adding content. Which was something I had been suggesting from the start.

I used WordTracker to find keyword phrases to target, The titles of the pages are the keyword phrases and the pages are all written with the keyword phrase creatively used so it reads well, but is keyword rich.

I have increased the amount of written pages and content from 7 to 23(not published yet). Now I am looking for a way to arrange the pages so that the site is easy to navigate for users, but also optimized for search engines.

I came up with this Javascript menu, the customer loves it. Now I'm not sure if the links in it can be followed by spiders. It is set up as a demo, dummy page only here:
http://www.dewebsign.com/usedslate/about.html

If the Javascript menu links cannot be followed by spiders, any suggestions another form of navigation so the site will get indexed properly?

I'm not even sure what other questions to ask. Any suggestions are welcome.

Heather
Dewebsign.com

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04-29-2004, 02:10 PM	#1 (permalink)
dewebsign Inactive Join Date: 11-23-03 Location: The Slate Valley, NY/VT border Posts: 44 iTrader: 0 / 0% Latest Blog: None	Redesign leads to less traffic, leads to redesign I was hired by a slate manufacturer to redesign his site back in October. He had designed a site with Yahoo pagemaker and was unable to position text without over-writing pictures and when I looked at the code it was a mess, with body tags ending the page before the page even started and other coding errors. One thing I found annoying about his original site was the navigation. You could get to any page from the home page, but once you visited a page there were only 3 choices, home, back and next. The 7 pages were set up in a loop all with the same home, back and next, with only these three links out of each. Site redesign was done in January. Site looks pretty. Each page looks the same, Navigation is fully meshed for easy use. Still 7 pages. Most of the text stayed the same. http://www.usedslate.com For nearly 3 months traffic stayed the same or increased from the old site's numbers. The requests for information were at an all time high. Mid-March Traffic plummeted. Traffic from Google, nearly stopped. Requests for information went down and nearly stopped. After March 19, for almost a week, there were NO requests for information which was down from an average of 35 weekly for the previous month. The customer realized something was up and emailed me in a panic when his site could no longer be found on google. It had been coming up in the top 5 for 18 keywords. Now it was not in the top 3 pages! I checked, and the site was still indexed in google, just not ranking. I suggested adding content. Which was something I had been suggesting from the start. I used WordTracker to find keyword phrases to target, The titles of the pages are the keyword phrases and the pages are all written with the keyword phrase creatively used so it reads well, but is keyword rich. I have increased the amount of written pages and content from 7 to 23(not published yet). Now I am looking for a way to arrange the pages so that the site is easy to navigate for users, but also optimized for search engines. I came up with this Javascript menu, the customer loves it. Now I'm not sure if the links in it can be followed by spiders. It is set up as a demo, dummy page only here: http://www.dewebsign.com/usedslate/about.html If the Javascript menu links cannot be followed by spiders, any suggestions another form of navigation so the site will get indexed properly? I'm not even sure what other questions to ask. Any suggestions are welcome. Heather Dewebsign.com [/url]