Need a little advice

[Nighthawk]

As some of you know, I recently got ordained as neo Druid minister. My friend Jaime is a wedding coordinator, and she and I decided to start a Celtic themed wedding coordination business. We have been advertising around town for a grand total of 3 days now, and have several pipers and photographers approach us looking to network, telling us what a great idea we have and what a good thing we've started. So here is the website that we launched this weekend. My question is, what would you like to see us do that isn't already listed? We've been thinking about this and looking at it for long that I feel like we may have lost a little bit of our perspective. If you see anything that we may have missed that you think should be there, please let me know!

Here's the link:

http://www.cocelticweddings.com/

Thanks in advance!!

And one more thing- this is NOT an attempt to solicit business!!

[Bugbear]

Well, you make it pretty clear that you will work with the people involved to craft the whole thing around there ideas, so I don't know what you would add. I can't comment on any of the visual things about the site, but it sounded fine. Although, I didn't see anything about the feast of gluttony, firewalking in bunny pajamas, and public face tatooing... Sorry, Nighthawk, I had to get one joke in there.

[berserkbishop]

Good looking site, and what seems like very fair pricing!

BB

[PiobBear]

HTML is your friend.

Meta tags:

Title. Currently if someone bookmarks your site (or a search engine spiders it), it'll be called "Blank Page". Hopefully the title will include your most descriptive keyword(s) and/or business name.

Description. Will appear under the title (currently, "Blank Page") on a search engine. Should definitely include your most descriptive keyword(s).

Keywords. All of the words that when Googled you want to direct to your site ("wedding, marriage, handfasting, Denver", etc.), in decending order of importance.

Other stuff:

Word count. Some search engines define relevance by the number of times certain keywords are included in the text. Some search engines give greater weight to keywords mentioned in headings ("<H1>Celtic Weddings</H1>"). Keywords in images (like your banner) don't count; spiders don't read images (although keywords in alternate text do, so give every image an alternate text that includes your most productive keywords). Do not fill your page with hidden keywords (wedding wedding wedding wedding, ad infinitum), some search engines will smack you for it.

Address. Some search engines are also indexing by address and ZIP code, enabling searches for local businesses. To do this, the address and ZIP code need to be in text somewhere in the HTML code, not an image.

If possible, create and upload a ROR file and sitemap listing all the pages you would like search engines to index. Some spiders go straight for these files (if available) when they explore your site.

Include an "email me" button somewhere promenent, using a Javascript to mask your email address from spambots. You'll increase your queries.You can encode the subject line so that with a quick scan of your email you'll see it's from your site (or with a filter with a dedicated folder, your email client can automatically download it and file it out of the background clutter).

Don't let "Fairy Dance" loop indefinitely (or don't use it at all); some people find autostart embedded music annoying, and it can crash some browsers.

[haukehaien]

Over all, it looks good. I would agree with everything that PiobBear said above, and add that you might want to change "Call us your FREE Consultation!" to "Call us for your FREE consultation!" which I suspect is the meaning you were going for.

[Arlen]

That's a great idea.
You might also want to consider advertising on www.witchvox.com if you don't already.
Most people I know having any kind of 'Pagan' ceremony check on there first.


Good luck!

[beloitpiper]

The site is well done, but make the music optional. I'm always listening to music when I'm online and it bothers me when you go to a website with music that you can't turn off.

[Colin]

The site is well done, but make the music optional. I'm always listening to music when I'm online and it bothers me when you go to a website with music that you can't turn off.

I second that. It seems like every home made Celtic themed site needs to have music playing as soon as the site loads. Like Greg I usually already have music playing and if I can't turn it off on the site I am on, I usually move on from the site.

[Erisianmonkey]

I will third that. I personally stop browsing most websites that use forced embedded music. I used it myself at one point years ago, and quit when I looked at my page stats. Most people never went any deeper than the first page that I had embedded music on. It drove people off. I killed the music and watched the stats on my deeper pages rise.

I will congratulate you on the decision to not do a splash & flash page. Other than the tag and title stuff and some minor page cleanup I don't have any other recommendations for you.

[Bugbear]

I didn't get any music when I went yesterday, but if I had, I would have been forced to leave: blind guy screen reader speach issue. And the part about not having fire walking in bunny pajamas still bothers me... although, it might be better to not advertise that and let it be implied...