Question

Topic: Website Critique

How To Improve Adcracker.com

Posted by Anonymous on 4/8/2008 at 6:40 PM ET 500 Points
Hi all:

We are laying plans to improve our site at AdCracker.com, and we want to identify the top five or sex things we should be looking at for SEO, usability, eCommerce et cetera.

AdCracker has been around for a long time in Web years, and has a loyal following of buyers and visitors. So we don’t’ want to go too far from what’s working.

What’s your take?

Thanks in advance - Steve
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RESPONSES

  • Posted by Jay Hamilton-Roth on 4/8/2008 at 7:23 PM Accepted
    1) Add analytics (so you can figure out who's visiting your site).

    2) Modernize/clean up your menus. You've got menus at the top and left side of your site.

    3) Get rid of the right column (on your home page). It'll make your site cleaner.

    4) Make it more obvious what content you have. Right now, there's too much scrolling and it's hard to scan.

    5) More examples. Let your visually rich examples show what you can do.
  • Posted on 4/9/2008 at 10:38 AM Member
    From your homepage:

    "Here you'll find expert info, sample ads, and interactive "concept triggers" to help you create advertising and marketing ideas. Both brand and direct response. To the standards of an international ad agency. Faster than ever."


    This is supposed to be about helping advertisers improve their creative. I find the site very hard to read because of the poor grammar, as shown it the quote above. If I was an advertiser, and I am, I would not continue into the site for that reason alone. Because you've asked for a critique, I've browsed around.

    First, from the home page, I have no idea what action you would like me to take. The first available action is a link to your Top 10 ads. Now that I've clicked there, what do you want me to do? How does my time spent looking at these ads get me closer to whatever ultimate action you want me to take? How does looking at 10 ads help me improve my ads?

    Next, I tried a menu option. Selecting AdTools, I'm again faced with a long column of text, including links and a video, but without a clear call to action. As far as I can see, none of the links tie directly to the product you are trying to sell.

    Your site tells me, if I read long enough, what type of information I can get from your company. I just have to hope that it is presented in a form I can use. How about some screen shots? Could you show me some sample menus?

    In my opinion, this doesn't just make for a less effective website. It casts doubt on the quality of work done by the company. If the goal is to help people improve their creative output, you would think that the company would put their best foot forward. I'm afraid that this is not the best ad I've seen this week.

    The store I work for has an e-commerce web site and also produces 40 full page newspaper ads a year in house. I should be your target customer. Despite my browsing through the site, I don't see how it can help me. Sorry.

  • Posted on 4/9/2008 at 11:59 AM Member
    You should get a free marketing and SEO report from Website Grader it will cover the basics of SEO to get you started
  • Posted by darcy.moen on 4/10/2008 at 11:46 PM Accepted
    Five or sex things? I hope you mean six things. :-)

    Well, first off, your site may have been working in spite of itself. Right now, vanilla would be the best way I could describe your site, visually. The content is what's making, or holding your clients attention and bringing them back (or ripping you off).

    You site is all about the knowledge contained therein. The words convey the education. Let's call it what it is, its a book, a school, a device for learning and, it looks drab, like my old grade school.

    What can you do to dress it up? Well, that's the easy part. You need to grab a good graphic designer to offer some eye appealing visuals to augment the education, but not compete or over power it.

    You really ought to consider a content management system for administering content. I know enough about your web site and business to know that your content is based on the now, the 'what's hot today' in addition to the timeless classics that have worked since the dawn of time. A good content management system would make adding, changing or updating content a snap. You could add or swap better and better examples or lessons as you discover them.

    A decent content management system would also allow you to keep and administer an extensive library of images, audio, video and document files. Again, it would be easy to move, swap and exchange files as well as convey them to your students/clients.

    Depending on the content management system you decide upon, the SEO can be built right into it. The CMS I use has a range of components that bolt on for SEO and allow me to administer, tinker, tweak, assuage and tempt/taunt spiders from yahoo and google endlessly (just like they do to us).

    Use ability is from both sides.

    Side one is your clients/students/visitors. That would be where your graphic designer really earns his/her keep. Site design should be interesting enough to hold attention, not too bold as to swamp content, and easy enough to navigate. Ah-ha! A good designer IS worth what they ask after all if they can actually accomplish such with their site design.

    The other side is the administration of the web site content. Well, the CMS I've been using for 6 plus years is fairly easy to use, allows for multiple administrators (much like a newspaper's publishing staff of reporters, editors, chef editor, publisher owner). Each classification of content can have its own team and team leader, with all operating independently of each other and not stepping on each other's area (they are kept compartmentalized if you wish). The content administration itself is very easy with the content editor more in line with MS Word than uber geeky HTML. If you can type and learn a few basics about image placement, image size and hyper linking, well, you are almost ready to go.

    I should mention, I've configured this CMS to run focus groups, customer panels, as well as run a membership based site, a customer service training site, and currently configuring it to run a high school online learning course. Yes, this one CMS is THAT flexible and extendible.

    Here is the CMS as an online training resource (including testing): http:www.testmycsr.com

    Same CMS, but this time in ecommerce mode: https://www.clothingdoctor.com or https://www.ergosusa.com

    Here is the same CMS, but this time configured for use to highlight a musician's talent, bio, and samples of his music: https://www.davidakurtz.com

    I have more examples, but lets not blow those server stats of the other guys.

    You might want to consider posting a job here in MP for a complete web redesign and build. Or contact Kelly over at www.fatpipemedia.com to discuss.

    Darcy Moen
    Customer Loyalty Network

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