| Overall: | 20 | 3 |
| Design: | 7 | 1 |
| Navigation: | ||
| Usefulness: | 3 | 5 |
20
3
ControlMyPests is designed to help pest control companies gain more visibility in the growing pool of people searching for pest control on the WEB. Also included is helpful information for the everyday do-it-yourself homeowner who would rather conduct his/her own pest control or plans to hire a pest control company.
- What do you think of the design?
- Does the site look and operate as you would expect it to in your browser? What browser are you using?
- Does the homepage give a good explanation of the goal of the site? If not, what would you change?
- (For web developers) Is there anything you would change on the site in order to make it more SEO friendly?
- Of the few articles online, do you consider them interesting and helpful?
- Although the directory only contains 2 companies so far, in your opinion, is it well created? How much of a drawback do you think it is that people can't automatically add their listings to the directory? (Example of a listing:http://controlmypests.com/pest-control-directory/mi/kent-county/)
- Does the services page amply explain the different nuances of the site?
- What would you suggest to do as far as getting the word out about the site? I've got an email newsletter and the Articles section of the site already... What more should I be doing?
Thanks for the help.
1) Design is fine
2) Yes, FF 3.0 on Windows XP
3) Yes
4) not sure
5) yes, they were fine
7) I think the pricing looks low. However, I don't see much traffic so maybe that's just a way to build up? Seems like a pest control company should pay you more for their name to stick around on your site.
8) Not sure, probably a few articles on a magazine, newspaper ads?
I like the wordpress theme. Fits the scheme of your site.Excellent, brief description that explains right away what your site is about.
Would be neat if you would allow users to post articles as well to your site. Such as remedies/solutions they've experienced with controlling pests, etc.
Nice looking site. Colors / layout/ etc.
I tend to like squirrels in my yard and not think of them as pests, as your graphic implies.
The site feel like a waste land. I clicked on several states off the home page and they all returned empty pages. I would remove every state from the list that was empty.
On the home page I clicked on Texas and got an empty page. I then clicked on the "go back" button and it took me to a map page. I was expecting to go back to the home page since that is where I came from.
It's weird that the "all" tab in your article section front displays a very verbose teaser, where the "topic" tabs (like mole) have a very condensed teaser. I would expect for the teasers to either be the same or shorter on the "all" tab. You layout does not look like it will scale once you have 100 articles about 40 types of pests.
You have a site map, but it is missing most of your pages. I would make your homepage your highest ranked page. Consider changing "ControlMyPests" to "Control My Pests" in your title tags. It should be better for SEO.
Interesting site.
Good luck!
Although you may not have anything against squirrels, many people consider them pests because of their habit of locating entrances to attics and making a racket at night. Most squirrel control is just an act of proofing buildings from them or relocation.
Great point, Just yesterday I decided to start filling each of those pages with custom content that will be useful to people even if there are no listings yet.
Hmm... I'll think about that and decide on whether I want to change things...
You probably visited 1 of my 2 sitemaps, the other is called sitemap-static.xml and both are submitted to Google and other relevant search engines. Your insight about the title is great and I'll change that right away.
Have a good one.
If you have multiple site maps, you should make a site map index file and link to it from your robots.txt file. Currently your robots file is empty. The benefit of this is all search engines, not just the ones you manually submit your site maps to, will be able to index the information in your site maps.
Here is some information on how to build all your site maps automatically with rails.
http://www.evatt.com/blog/sitemaps/generating-sitemaps-rails
One thing to add to this blog post is it is very easy to adds hooks to your cap deploy script to regenerate your site maps before new deployments goes live.
BTW: I understand your point about squirrels. As long as they live in the squirrel homes instead of the people homes, I like them.
1. I think the design is good. Not blow me out of my seat great, but a good starting place. That said you might consider attempting to anchor the rodent images on the home page a bit more as they look like they are floating. Drop shadow maybe?
2. Yes, latest FF.
3. I would use a form in the active window and then mold the page design to focus on funneling people through the form. You can see an example of this kind for at http://www.managemyproperty.com . Also, the tabs on the top right are fairly prominent. I would tone them down by dropping the icon and stuffing them in a nav bar, unless of course those are important tabs you want people to click on.
3. You need to create geo specific content on each state page.
4. The articles are plenty good.
5. The bread crumb nav on the profile page should name the page rather than say "go up one level". The profile could be beefed up no doubt. I dont think its a big deal that companies can't get automatically listed, in fact this it is demonstrative of some editorial quality controls and reflects well on the directory imho.
1. I'll look into the possibilities...
3A. I would love to do this, but because of the limitations of Wordpress, this will have to come in a later version.
3B. I'm working on that using a new tool I just created: http://madlibmachine.com
5. Again, because of the limitations of Wordpress it is difficult to set up a useful breadcrumbs nav.
Thanks for the feedback Jordan, I appreciate it.
1. I like the design and color choices. It's simple and clean. I like the look of the navigation and the search box. I was a bit confused and didn't know what to expect to find in some of the sections like "Articles" and "Services". What would your articles be about? What kind of services? It made me question what the site was focused on.
2. Everything seemed to look and work fine for me using FF 3.5 on OS X.
3. No, in my opinion it didn't. I really wasn't sure what you meant by pests. I thought you might have been using that to mean something else. What? I don't know. I think maybe the fact that your site looked "modern" made me not think it was really bug related. Maybe if you added some cartoonish bugs/pests to the top graphics it would make it more obvious? I would also suggest stepping back and deciding what you really want to focus on because you seem to be getting pulled in multiple directions right now and it's showing through on your home page.
4. I'll let others chime in here.
5. The directory listing was probably a bit too sparse for my taste. There was not much information about the company presented there. Once you have more companies, how will I easily compare them? Will you add a comparison feature? I'm not sure why people can't automatically add their listings. Is it so you can moderate what is added? Is it a technical reason?
6. The services page was one of the things I found odd. I wasn't sure what I was seeing there. It seemed to be an odd mix of an about page and a product/pricing page. Not sure what to do here.
7. Unfortunately I don't know much about the pest control industry so I'm not sure what you can do on that side to get providers signed up. For attracting people looking for pest control service I think your best bet is going to be a LOT of high quality articles on any/all topics related to pest control. Articles specific to different problems like ants, spiders, termites, etc. so that people looking for information on those problems might stumble across your site.
3) Check the homepage now. What do you think? What more would you change?
5) This will improve in time if interest in the site increases. For now the directory is manual to be cost effective and because Wordpress does not have a built in system for a directory. So, in answer to your last two questions, both.
6) Now that you point it out, I completely agree. I'll have to think about it for a little while, and develop a new version soon...
7) So far that's been my plan. We'll see how it goes...
Thanks for the great feedback. You never know half the problems with your site until you get some real people to look at it...
Yah I think that helps a bit. Not quite what I had in mind but that doesn't really matter.
You may also want to work on your value proposition. Figure out what you offer to visitors and some it up in one sentence if you can. Kind of like a summary of your 30 second elevator pitch. What you have right now (The source for everything pest related) is extremely vague.
Glad you found the feedback useful and good luck with the site!