Name of Site/Business: Internet4Aid

Site's Main Purpose: Ecommerce/Sales

Please Review the following:
Does the home page sufficiently convince people to go further into the site?

Does/can the site achieve its main purpose?

Navigation. Is it clear and easy to understand?

Appearance/Attractiveness

Is the Contact, Privacy and Legal information adequate in relation to main purpose of site?

Search engine marketing. Can the pages be reasonably well indexed by search engines?



Additional Comments/Notes
The purpose of these CMS websites are to provide a low to reasonable cost website for non-profit organizations. It has achieved a Alexa rank of 197,349 since the beginning of the year. The site software is based on object patterns and an operational approach that if you can type you can self-manage the data content site. Each site comes with built-in Google Friendly html design that get the site registered with Google in less that 2 weeks. If the SEO options are enabled then a site gets registered with Yahoo, AltaVista (I worked with them in 2000-2001), Excite, and Webcrawler but not MSN.

One current concern is about Google PageRank for which I have a big fat zero. The sites have been re-engineered such that we now get very low error counts for XHTML 1.0 Strict compliance.

The 2nd issue is that only one person / month creates a site. I know there is a big demand in the non-profit market place and these sites with this state-of-the-art SEO object patterns with its highly flexible design can meet the basic needs for major of small to medium organizations. The general design is enterprise so that multiple websites can be networked together. The original design networked 100 baseball teams with a league site; baseball moms and kids have been using the older software for over 3 year so we know that it support non-technical people very well. From a technology future viewpoint the design should have a very long shelf-life of over 5 years for this software architecture.

Feel free to comment - take your best shot.
This is my legacy project for all the years of success I have had in the (IT) Information Technology profession (my passion as a phyisist is the study of string theory and chasing chaos to find its intended order in the universe.

Thanks for your help in advance.

Hi
I looked at your site and I noticed that your sitemap is very confusing as you list the same information for each of your pages, I do not think this is necessary. One of your links pointed to a page where there was nothing on it, or not much. Your Goolge SEO ads did not lead anywhere, the one at the bottom of the page. I feel that as you recommend as a site designer your site could be more dynamic or interesting. There is just basic info on each of your links perhaps you could improve on the content and add links to content. Giving examples of your sites would be good too. Hope this helps but I am not an expert at all.

Actually, the Site Map is under construction. It maybe done this week. It will provide 2nd level links to detailed description pages for all the list service pages such as Services, Industry News, Topics, Links, etc.

It is actually a part of new software approach that has 3 level of indirections so that multiple languages can be used. Sorry about the incomplete service page.

The ad service is being enhanced today and s/b deployed this evening. And is very extensive in that it will manage several different ad zones on every page. Currently the ad zones are very primitive but I appreciate the comments about the ad links - I will look at them again after this newest enhancement.

The architecture of this site is very simple - it doesn't use a template approach but a framework with mini-frameworks. You can use the "Demo.Internet4Aid" link at the bottom of the page - then click its "Admin Login" at the bottom of the Demo site's page. On this page type 'Demo' in the password field and you can enter the Demo site.

These sites were originally built to be demo'd by sales-mans but we are enhancing this to be more user activated and interactive. I'm getting a little low on ideas on how-to improve these start up steps.

Once in - there are 2 basic master menus: Main menu for data content management and a style menu for changing the website display features. Obviously there is a small learning curve but most people once they log-in and cruise the menus quickly become effective in updating their data content. As I said previously we have a similar sports model that has serviced over 100 baseball team and they league site for over 3 years. We also maintain over 500 Market Attractor websites (different market segments) for market segment lead generation. These client users have effectively cut their manpower usage by one person a year for doing content management updates and SEM tuning of the sites. Currently test M/A Traffic Stats show that cost per qualified leads run from a high of $5/lead to average of $1 or $2 per lead. The ratio of front-end visits is to M/A landing page conversion is 50:2 with site M/A conversion of around 20 qualified leads per site per month. This is very, very new Internet CMS and marketing technology approach so we have generate very little revenues since we had to accept whatever we could get to make the CMS software become a live system.

However, my legacy issue started with my non-profit and the Market Attractor CMS website was a spin-off to help pay the bills. Conceptual the design isn't biased toward either market places but the data content need to make the site SEO and SEM payoff has been more stressed than attempting to make a few dynamic looking sites. Good looking site is the tail of dog when viewed from having a dynamic SEO and SEM website. Communications, communications, and communications are the primary goal then looking good. But I love a challenge!

However, I sincerely appreciate your comments about the site sample issue. One way we have attempted to cover this issue is by providing a "Links" service page of our other CMS created sites as well as Top Sites. These are site we generated from our CMS software. As a lower priority issue we are attempting to create thumbnail pages for easier site generation and demos.

One of the most costly and less profitable (to-date) design issue is our web-page framework approach. Our web-page framework allows different webpage designs whereas today we only display one KISS webpage design. Since the system is an enterprise design we provide webpage framework change controls so that multiple frameworks can be deployed. This is currently being used to deploy a few custom designed frameworks. I am entertaining a couple more webpage designs but if you see a particular webpage design you think would be popular - I'm all ears - uh - eyes.

There are 2 current design constraint issues:
1 - only flat menu styles are used (no pull-down) because they have the highest intrinsic SEO value
2 - we have a total up CSS design but since nobody is paying we have not finished its coding and it is not available for viewing on our Production site. However, it is working via our Enterprise system.