Review my Site

[stocks]

Hey fellas whats up I finally got my site www.thegamblersnetwork.com looking kind of the way I like it and was woundering if anyone had any suggestions or criticism on it.

Thanks

[Former Member 14]

Hi stocks,
I like the your layout and the color scheme, simple but effective without being over cluttered, great start :clap:

However there are a few issues...

Big error - You have no body tags in your html

Tend to go over sites with a fine tooth comb, so please bear with me here...

Meta Tags
Some of the meta tags your using even I have no idea what they are used for. Some people only use title, description, keywords & charset. Whilst others like myself you a few more.

Your title tag is too long imo. Too many words are going to dilute the importance of your main keywords. Which imo you should focus on no more than 3 main keywords per page.

Your Title:
The Gamblers Network recommended sportsbooks internet poker room online casino internet horse racing
Number of words in Title:
You use 13 words, at most this should be 10.
Numbers of characters in Title:
You use 100 characters in your title, use at most 67.

Instead of trying to cram everything that your site is about into you title tag, use your 3 main keyword here. On other pages do the same.

EG:
If you have a page about online poker, then begin the tile with online poker and add keywords or keyword phrases that complement your main page topic, get the drift ;)

JavaScript
The navigation JavaScript is currently hard coded to your page. I tend to call my js from a file. Place the following code into a file & call it something like nav.js place this in a folder called js.

Then add the following code just above your closing head tag:<SCRIPT language=JavaScript src="js/img.js" type=text/javascript>< /script>
[/code]
This is the code that needs to be placed in your external js.

function MM_swapImgRestore() { //v3.0
var i,x,a=document.MM_sr; for(i=0;a&&i<a.length&&(x=a[i])&&x.oSrc;i++) x.src=x.oSrc;
}
function MM_preloadImages() { //v3.0
var d=document; if(d.images){ if(!d.MM_p) d.MM_p=new Array();
var i,j=d.MM_p.length,a=MM_preloadImages.arguments; for(i=0; i<a.length; i++)
if (a[i].indexOf("#")!=0){ d.MM_p[j]=new Image; d.MM_p[j++].src=a[i];}}
}
function MM_findObj(n, d) { //v4.01
var p,i,x; if(!d) d=document; if((p=n.indexOf("?"))>0&&parent.frames.length) {
d=parent.frames[n.substring(p+1)].document; n=n.substring(0,p);}
if(!(x=d[n])&&d.all) x=d.all[n]; for (i=0;!x&&i<d.forms.length;i++) x=d.forms[i][n];
for(i=0;!x&&d.layers&&i<d.layers.length;i++) x=MM_findObj(n,d.layers[i].document);
if(!x && d.getElementById) x=d.getElementById(n); return x;
}
function MM_swapImage() { //v3.0
var i,j=0,x,a=MM_swapImage.arguments; document.MM_sr=new Array; for(i=0;i<(a.length-2);i+=3)
if ((x=MM_findObj(a[i]))!=null){document.MM_sr[j++]=x; if(!x.oSrc) x.oSrc=x.src; x.src=a[i+2];}
}
function inputFocus(ref, defaultString) {
if (ref.value == defaultString) {
ref.value = '';
}
}
function inputBlur(ref, defaultString) {
if (ref.value == '') {
ref.value = defaultString;
}
}

The reason for doing this is it cuts down the amount of useless code that google or other SE's have to crawl before actually getting to you content.
I've always held the belief that google or other SE's tend to do shallow crawls to a present number of code lines. Serving JavaScript from an external code = less is more for the SE's.

Cascading Style Sheets
I see that you make use of an external css (good), however you then use face & font size tags in your html?

As your using a style sheet these really need to be transposed over to the style sheet & not hard coded to the page. Instead of font size & face, you'd call these up with class directives from your css instead.

As a good example:

<span style="mso-fareast-font-family: Times New Roman; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA"><font size="2" face="Verdana">

The above code is used many times in your html, however, this can all be cut down to reference an entry in your css, which would end up looking like this:
class=whatever (whatever being to directive to the above style in your css which would represent this code).

Screen Caps
The clickable sportbooks & poker room screen captures you've got on the right side of your pages. Personally I'd be ditching the borders. Instead maybe take each screen cap & place a thin graphic border around each one.
If you use MX Fireworks or Adobe, you could go one better and place a shadow under these images too.

I've taken the liberty of whipping up a rough example, using your first image:



Internet Explorer Script Error:
When the site has loaded I'm getting a script error warning at the bottom left of my browser bar. I'd be checking what scripts your running and making sure nothing is conflicting. The likely cause could be your popup window...

Personal I don't bother with these. On one hand it pisses people off and the second one, XP SP2 uses a generic pop up blocker which basically makes these pretty much obsolete.

Also most users these day's use some type of popup blocker anyway.

Poker Section:
The bullets are a great idea, it draws focus to the important points.
However, whatever layout you've used in relationship to the bonus percentages (%) they look a bit shabby.

My suggestion is, if your going to use a layout such as this then using a table a table with two (2) columns X the number of entries for rows will help keep everything even and aesthetically pretty.

EG:

Aligning the poker rooms to the left of each table cell & the bonus %'s to the right of each table cell you'd then produce a display that would be acceptable. As it stands now your 30% for CanBet sits under the hundred column.

Maybe a little too pedantic for some, however, I feel if your trying to portray a professional site then you need it need to look professional too.

Anyway's these are my thoughts, feedback & suggestions.

On a whole though I think you've got a nice site concept that just needs some more dev work.



Cheers

Dave


Who was the PM sent to?

I'll make sure this is fixed.
</SCRIPT></P>

[Former Member 14]

I seemd to have posted some type of code within code BB tags that have removed the edit fuction from my post & has also striped the rest of my post...

Sent a PM to try & get this fixed...

[stocks]

Thanks Dave I really appriciate it man I dont really know a whole lot about website stuff I'm basicly just reading what I can and learning as a go.

The Body Tags I'm pretty sure I may have deleted some on a couple pages when I was adding content I'll put them back.

Meta tags I noticed there seemed to be a lot of those compared to some other sites that I viewed the source of but I know much about em if they're helping or hurting I dont know.

Title and keywords I'll fix that, I used a program and it said you should try and put 100 charters in the title 250 in the dscription and 1000 in keywords thats why it was like that but I'll do like you said and fix that.

[CityGuard]

Who did you send the PM to?

For now, I've made a quick fix to the post by removing the code you recommend adding. I'm not sure what the best way to post the information is -- how it can be displayed without being read as actual coding. I'll do some digging into this Monday and post an answer here for everyone. The time-intensive workaround would be to take a screenshot of the code and post the image, but I'm sure there is an easier solution (i.e. some text to include that will disable the code).

[Former Member 14]

Who did you send the PM to?

For now, I've made a quick fix to the post by removing the code you recommend adding. I'm not sure what the best way to post the information is -- how it can be displayed without being read as actual coding. I'll do some digging into this Monday and post an answer here for everyone. The time-intensive workaround would be to take a screenshot of the code and post the image, but I'm sure there is an easier solution (i.e. some text to include that will disable the code).

Thanks CityGuard,

PM'd Michael C...

As far as the code goes, I used {code} & {/code}(replace{} with the [ ] ). By all rights it shouldn't have screwed with anything as that's supposed to be the accepted syntax; as long as I can remember it has been so.

Unless of course that bbcode has been disabled for the forum. By placing that in the thread just made the page go haywire

Thanks for fixing my stuff up, sorry about that.



Cheers

Dave

[jagan]

From my point of view, overall website is OK......U need to take care of Meta Tags and SEO