[WEBSITE] Review Joffee Publishing Inc's site please.

Hello all,

I'm requesting a review of Joffee Publishing Inc's website at http://joffeepublish.com please. Tell me what you think, and if anything needs improving.

Thanks,
Nathan P.

It is not bad. It is a simple site, but I guess that's fine.

Maybe you should add more content in your home page, and make clear what the site is about (you can't understand that from the home page)

You homepage gives no indication what you do; something about publishing and reading. A site visitor is going to give you only a few seconds to make that clear otherwise you will lose most of them. Too many words on the homepage can be a turnoff, too few and you fail to convey your message.

A mission statement should also include what you do - a mission statement like you have is over simplified - every company claims they will do everything to support the customer. Perhaps check out mission statements of some larger companies and you will see better what I mean.

The most valuable piece of real estate on your page has a marquee proclaiming that you are now displaying your pagerank and Alexa rank - I don't want to be mean - but neither are going to bring you sales unless you are selling links. I would remove that immediately.

Your sales page seems to use a different template - colors the same, but the banner isn't.

Pretend you are telling someone about Joffee Publishing but only have 60 seconds to do so. Now take that "elevator speech" and put it on your homepage. You are asking people to part with their hard earned money and trust that you will fulfill your end of the bargain - your site hasn't convinced me that you would not just take my money.

C'mon Nathan - we all know you can do better than this.  :-*

You took this http://www.freecsstemplates.org/templates/previews/bizbox/
a plain but nice CSS layout and added tables! what was the point of starting with a semantic css layout?
I'm all for using nicely designed templates hell we shop in the same place ;) but the point to those templates were they were examples of tableless designs.

But moving on you or your web designer may wish to read a couple of articles
http://ventureskills.wordpress.com/2007/03/13/deadly-sins-of-seo-sites/
http://www.webdigity.com/index.php/topic,6136.0.10+Tips+to+Self+Review.html

Displaying news about showing button, is that news?, how about telling your potential customers about the products? the page rank and alexa bits will not impress people who know what they are, and it will just confuse those who don't and is providing a potential customer a way to leave the site!

While I'm all for credit where its due, you have a link to csstemplate one to your web designer another credit to the logo artist, why don't you create a thankyou page with a paragraph about each of their services with a link, for them it will be better then just a link and clean up the interface.

SEO wise, not even simple stuff like meta tags has been done, no thought has been given to titles, and any semantic meaning that was in the template has been lost. These may help
http://www.seomoz.org/article/beginners-guide-to-search-engine-optimization
http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors

So to sum up,
Get rid of the tables,
get rid of the marquee
Reduce the external link count
Tidy the template
Add meta information
but the big one, add content to the front page and subpages, also make sure the template works through out the site, there is nothing worse for developing a brand then inconsistency.

Right now you taken a couple of steps forward from the previous version, but alot of the comments that were made before are still there. If you wish to offer services and expect people to pay you, then you must have a consistent brand that is devoted to the subject, if you go to IBM or Wallmart site do you see discussion forums with sections on religion?

I guess ultimately is Joffee Publishing a business attempt or a home page for you, it can't at least at the moment be both and if you want the first option you need to disconnect anything personal and non business focused from the main site.

It's PHP powered, how did I know that it was based on tables?? Great, but I shouldn't have asked for a review after discussing this with J Love (aka Meth0d, who also got slaughtered by you guys for a similar site).

lol

Hey, just a friendly note to you guys: PHP ain't perfect, and neither is this forum. That bug that allows a thread-starter to delete his posts/lock them is still working...LOL! <removed due to not wanting to get banned/temporarily insane thought process> >:D ;D

But doing so would result in you being banned from webdigity, and then you would see how effective our banning system is ;)
Its not PHP fault that smf has a bug in it, and PHP has nothing to do with tables.

sounds like the thread starter doesn't like critique :)

@WhiteEagle,

don't ask for a review if you don't like the answer ;)

I should of asked Meth0d's opinion before asking anyways. I won't go and delete it, though fix the bug...it's so tempting sometimes :D ;D

That bug is really annoying. Can you still delete your own threads here?

now I understand why the number of threads is so low :D

Nathan, Nikolas is one of the most easy-going forum owners when it comes to self promotion. If you wanted to promote Joffee Publishing and your new site - there's a place for that.

You asked for a review. If you wanted to hear "oooh that's pretty", never ask for a review in a webmaster forum where the intent is to share ideas and help each other MAKE THEIR SITES BETTER.

I know you are young and maybe see us as "slaughtering you" but we are trying to help you understand some of the issues your site does not address and will keep your site from making as much money as it could. I know you are disappointed that we found fault, but better now than after you dump a lot of time and money promoting the site and being disappointed when no one is buying.

All of us took time from our own projects to give you guidance. Several of us, as part of our business, charge for this service, yet we gave it to you for free. Some of us old geezers might actually know what we are doing and instead of being upset that we picked your site apart, you should be thankful we offered you our time.

This is probably the best suggestion :P I agree with that very much

Thanks YMC, and I am going to update the Mission Statement, and maybe see what else I can do to improve it. Thanks for the time guys.

Nikolas: Yes, the bug is still there. PM me for my password if you need some proof (I'll change it after you are done!) and log in as me, an ordinary user. Check out where I've started threads that have gone to at least two pages, and you'll see the moderation icons. ;)

I will check this later. I have a dummy user for this kind of stuff :)

Maybe I will disable deleting threads from the code not the permission system, just to be sure :)