Development Web

Do you want your website evaluated and obtain a followed link from Development Web? We are taking website submissions to evaluate a website’s usability, SEO, look and feel and cleanliness of code.

The first website that was submitted was from one of our partner’s contacts, My Mortgage Loans. The website is a blog that provides mortgage advice for young Australians.

Look and Feel
The website is clearly built on Wordpress and running a fairly plain customisation of the Thesis theme. Unfortunately the website suffers from a lack of originality – it just looks the same as all the other Wordpress blogs out there. The website has no proper logo or unique selling point in clear view.

In order to get repeat visits and to establish themselves as a legitimate brand, they need to apply basic marketing principles to the website.

Cleanliness of code
The Thesis theme has some of the cleanest code. However, there is always room for improvement. For example, all CSS should be externalised to help load the page faster.

SEO
There are some clear attempts at SEO, but they have neglected some must-have items:

• Mismatching <title> & <h1> tags on the homepage. The current title and h1 are duplicate which looks computer generated. Search engines like to see unique content!
• Poor internal linking (using related posts plugin does not equate to a good internal linking strategy).
• Outdated nofollow PageRank sculpting methods.
• No proper or unique information on the archive pages

There are also very few inbound links (probably due to the website’s young age).

Usability
One thing that the website does have going is clear site architecture and navigation. There is a clear definition between the top level navigation as well as the categories down the right hand side.

Call to action as well as the social media plugins are put in the correct spot, but there doesn’t seem to be any tracking on them (from our quick look at the source code).
A problem that may arise in the future, as the website grows in size, is the fact that the search bar will demand a more prominent position.

Although there is an ‘about us’ page, I cannot find a way to contact the owner of the website without going through the social media avenues.

Can you think of anything else that the website may need to address to improve usability, look and feel and SEO?

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