SEOmoz Seminar - Sessions So Good They’ll Make Your Head Hurt!
As you all know I attended the SEOmoz Expert Training Seminar last week (Aug. 19 & Aug. 20) and I had previously told you that I would review the sessions for our readers once I got back. Well, unfortunately, I cannot review the sessions for you as they have asked us not to blog about what was taught at the various sessions. I totally respect that and have no issues with not being able to tell our readers what we learned. I can, however, let you know what the sessions were about. Then, you can see why my head hurt after the sessions were over! That’s just how good the sessions were at SEOmoz and I am definitely glad that I got to attend the event.
Day One
Thinking Like A Search Engineer - Rand Fishkin
Elite Site Architecture - Rand Fishkin & Stephan Spencer
White Hat Cloaking - Rand Fishkin
Spam Detection & False Positives - Nick Gerner
Legal Issues - Sarah Bird
Site Reviews - Rebecca Kelley & Rand Fishkin
Global Search - Will Critchlow & Duncan Morris
Sitemaps & Webmaster Tools - Rand Fishkin & Stephan Spencer
Crawlability - Jeff Pollard
Day Two
Reputation Management - Will Critchlow & Duncan Morris
Social Networks For SEO - Jane Copland
Opportunities & Pitfalls Of Buying Links - Seth Besmertnik
Enterprise Link Building - Rand Fishkin
Vertical Search Inclusion - Stephan Spencer
Future Of Search Engines - Danny Sullivan
Expert Q&A - Danny Sullivan, Rand Fishkin, Stephan Spencer, Nick Gerner, Will Critchlow & Duncan Morris
These sessions were so great we’re going to implement quite a few of their suggestions in our services at Regency Interactive. Just to give you a hint of what we will be implementing; we’re going to offer more in depth site reviews, more social media services, putting more thought into conversions for our clients and so forth.
P.S. It was also great to meet the people I treat with on a daily basis: Alex Bennert, Brian Carter, Dana Lookadoo, Danny Sullivan, David Mihm, Derek Edmond, Dr. Pete, Duncan Morris, Jane Copland, Jeff Donenfeld, Joshua Sciarrino, Martin Bowling, Monica Wright, Stephan Spencer, Taylor Pratt and Will Critchlow.
P.S.S If you are ever at one of these events and by chance see something on someone’s shirt like say some chocolate from a Twix they ate a couple of hours before lunch then be sure and let them know it’s there. Otherwise, they will walk all around at lunch and throughout the rest of the day with chocolate rubbed in on his/her shirt. That’s not a good way to network now is it? 
Website Redesign: What Is Wrong With http://www.controlnoise.com/
Today, starts the first post in regards to our “What is Wrong With This Website” series that we will be doing at Regency Interactive. Each day we’ll pick a website that one of our team members came across here recently and we will dissect their website somewhat to point out issues on their website. First up is ControlNoise.com! Recently one of our team members at Regency was looking to soundproof one of their spare rooms so that they could turn it into a studio and came across Control Noise’s website.
Issues We Noticed
At first glance the design issues are very easy to spot. the site looks outdated with their design and it also appears that the site was designed for a display setting over 640 * 480 pixels with default link colors to go along with a boring color scheme. With today’s design methods it’s easy for websites to make their links match the site’s color scheme.
Upon further investigation you can see that the website does not work the same in Firefox as it does in Internet Explorer. You can also see that their logo does not include their company name. You have to scan to the far right to see what their company name is and that’s not good design.
Also, their links suggest that you can “search” amongst their products, but once you click on “Search By Product” all you get on the next page is a list of links for particular products. This does not allow a user to “search” through their products. It also makes their users “click” one extra time than they really need to do on the site. If they listed all of their products on the homepage then a user could find what they need quicker on the site which would help with sales conversions and so forth. The same thing goes for “Search By Application” as well.
Next, we noticed that they have pages within the website that you can only get to from certain pages of the website. This is not good for the users as it will make it harder to find certain pages. Granted, there is a sitemap on the website, but you still should make the site easier to navigate for your users.
Finally, the big turn-off about the site is their color scheme. The color is not very appealing to a user as it’s very boring. Given the choices they offer for fabric choices you would think they would know about color schemes.
These are just a few things we were able to spot on this site that we thought needed to be corrected. Believe it or not, how your website looks to your potential customers will tell them right off the bat if they are going to buy from you or not. Stay tuned for tomorrow’s website!
Tags: usability, web design, web redesign, website design, website redesign
