Hi there! I recently started a blog about my fashion interests as well as makeup/beauty etc. I used Squarespace because I’m not that familiar with coding, but regardless I want to make sure the flow of my website is good. Any advice? Or any general tips regarding how the site flows and whether or not I should structure things differently?
Here’s my site: accentsandedges.com
Thanks a lot!
Hi. The website mentioned here is is quite typical, based on a template which is not necessarily a bad thing. I did not check the image file sizes, but they look quite big (file size, not dimensions) and could make the site load slow. I would be more worried about the landing pages, mostly on the blog. Each page should be almost an “answer” to a user query, that seems to be the formula these days for Google and users as well.
For example, if the user would be searching for “Big Farm” and would end up on a linked page, it is quite obvious what they want the user the do. So basically matching the search intent with a good result and make that “fast”. Hope this helps.
Agreed. If you want to get an idea of how your website is actually functioning (gametop mentioned slow loading speed due to image size) then you can run it through a website checker - something like this. It should rank your layout and usability (what you are referring to as flow), accessibility, security, speed, etc. That’s a good place start to know where you need to improve your site and then you can figure out how to fix it. It kind of gives you the blueprints to build on. Once you have an idea of where you need to improve, you can also ask here with more specific questions related to these areas and received more specific help.
The first point to be aware of is that your site doesn’t work with JavaScript disabled, which is not good practice. It is also very JS-heavy; the scripts are adding huge bulk to your pages. For example, on this page: http://accentsandedges.com/blog/2016/4/18/2bimyf66houfbeyje3tsgww2fh48nb
It’s full of large images, which one would expect to have quite large file sizes - yet they’re outweighed by the size of the scripts. For such a simple page, that seems to me quite ridiculous. I realise you may be limited by the facilities offered by Squarespace, but if you want this to be anything more than a hobby, it might be worth thinking again how you approach this.
The navigation of your site requires a lot of scrolling, because of the size of the images, and it is not always clear where links go. This is especially true of the small images which look like a thumbnail gallery, but which lead to instagram.
Most of your images have no alt text, or inappropriate alt text, such as alt="DSC_4730.jpg". Alt text is important for those who cannot access the images for whatever reason, or for search engines. See http://webaim.org/techniques/alttext/ and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3NbuDpB_BTc for more information.
You also need to pay attention where you have text overlying an image, as it is sometimes difficult or impossible to read. e.g.
There is very little actual text on your pages, which rely mainly on multiple large images. This will not help you rank well in search engines and get found by people (assuming that’s what you want).
I hope that doesn’t sound too negative, and has given you some useful pointers for improvement.
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