Know-How Exchange : Website Critique

Hi,

First of all, what are the actions you want people to take on your website? Which are the most important? If you don't currently have priorities, I think that would be a great first step! Do you need donors? Are you very concerned about educating current pet owners? Are you concerned about educating people that are thinking of becoming pet owners?

You've got a lot of content which is great. I think the design could be tweaked a bit because it looks a bit dated. Why are the photos of animals at the top faded? Animals (pets) are your primary concern yet their beautiful faces are faded out. If I think of semiotics - that sends a mixed message. Images of animals should be front and center - given the psychological message that they are your priority.

On the homepage the Petco events are front and center....but you don't explain what the events are for. You need to add more content in events like this to help people understand why they should attend and for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) using keywords to help your website rank higher.

Your right column is full of CTAs which is great. But are people clicking through? If you don't have good volumes of people clicking through you might want to work on optimizing the forms. (By the way Hubspot offers a free tool to help you do this: https://action.grader.com/ ) For example, in your Email Events Subscription form you could add some information about what kinds of events subscribers will be notified about.

I'd consider finding another module for the Events Calendar to make it more clear which days events are being held on. It's not really intuitive.

On your mission statement page I'd consider changing it so that you have links (like bullet points) to Member Benefits, Why Join a Chamber of Commerce, etc...so that visitors know what content is available - rather than clicking next. "Next" means nothing as we'd generally expect to find the Mission Statement all on one page. On the "Why Join a Chamber of Commerce" page (and all others) check the spacing to make sure that the content is easier to read by having a full link break between paragraphs (also makes it look more professional).

While your fan volume on Twitter is great...I would suggest making the Tweets more effective by using proper casing, grammar where possible and using hashtags.

Your homepage needs more content because this is where people and search engines arrive. Your Pet Advocacy page is the best of the pages I viewed. Your homepage should look more like this.

Hope this helps. Feel free to let me know if you want more info.

Cheers,

K