Website Review
October’s website review focused on Burnett Painting of Venice, Florida. Steve and his wife April do most of the work on the site and we found a lot of great content, April has incredible writing skills and Steve’s use of video testimonials was by far the most impressive we have seen. Even so, you can see the benefit there can be had by using the services of professionals like Tess Wittler and Darren Slaughter. It’s been said over and over while doing these web reviews, there is just so much in flow, content and seo to learn!
Intro and opening
To start the website review we introduced Tess and Darren and he shared his demographics and business model.
The first 24 minutes were spent on the homepage:
Home Page
Optimizing the home page seems to be missed by many, the use of H1 tags and Alt tags is key for Google to see your site. Darren also suggested changing the title. Steve has a great logo and branding is consistent with his logos. Tess had some suggestions on improving the content and creating benefit statements. She suggested being more aggressive with services offered (again using H2 tags).
Darren has suggestions on creating a sales funnel and helping customers to navigate the site.
The Nine Year Warranty
Steve offers a nine year warranty, this is a great point of differentiation and should be utilized with additional information.
The Estimate Scheduler
Steve explains how the calendar benefits his customers. Darren had some thoughts on this….
Footer
Boots and Suspender theory explained by Darren!
Tess mentioned how well the colors and fonts work to give visual appeal.
At 24 minutes in, we moved to the next page:
About Us
The panel agreed there is a lot of information here, maybe too much, and some of it could certainly be shared on the home page as Tess suggests. Steve has some great family pictures and Tess he suggested that he used PicMonkey like she did here.
Sidebar
The downloadable PDF should be an individual page and emails collected from those that do download it. This content could be customized to include Burnett Painting.
Testimonials can be used in the sidebar with a plugin.
Pricing Page
Steve has a page with pricing on it that sparked a great discussion.
At 41 minutes we moved on to the blog:
The Blog
The navigation/flow was discussed and Darren suggested he move it to the end of the nav bar. We discovered a ton of great information that should be added into the website. The articles are very well done by Steve’s wife April. There was a lot of discussion on the integration.
Testimonials
One of the best features is the amount of testimonials! Steve needs to find a plugin that rotates the videos in the sidebars, there are several variations in the Worpress Repository like these. There is also a simple one that can be activated by using Jetpack.
Portfolios, Contact Page and Credentials
There were a few suggestions for improvement, overall, it is a good site!
A few of the other resources we discussed were Crazy Egg and Word Flood
Some great points were made, if you would like to join a website review, we will do them every month, check out the page here and enter your site!
Darren gives a great honest review , had him give my site a review while back. Thanks for posting this as couldn’t get on with iPad live . Great advice form all involved. Much success to Steve.
Thanks Nick, thanks for trying to attend, I don’t think the Live is supported on the IPad, I know your IPad kept ringing my Ipad though, so I think a regular hangout is possible! Don’t you love technology!
And you are right, Darren is brutally honest, I wouldn’t have it any other way, and Tess is a great counterpart!
Great review and very helpful suggestions! Thanks for doing this, Chris.
Jessi
Thanks Jessi, I couldn’t do it without Tess and Darren!