How can I improve my homepage?

[amica_webmaster]

Scottie's post with guidelines for submitting a site for critique have inspired me to ask for suggestions - particularly for the homepage, which is really blah. This site is for a nonprofit organization, I'm the one-woman volunteer web team, so we have limited resources, but I'll do my best to make improvements. The url is http://www.amica.org

Is this site completed or under construction?

This site is under construction.

Who is your target audience?

The general public, especially people who enjoy older music (popular 1890s-1930s or classical) or antiques.

How important is it for your site to rank well?

It helps!

How important is usability?

Very, very important. Much of our audience is people of mature years - the site should be easy to read and navigate. I've already made some changes in response to readability issues that were brought to my attention by our members.

What is the purpose of the site? (inform, sell, online community, support B&M business, contact info only, etc)

We'd like to attract people to have some involvement in mechanical music - for example, they might like to own and restore a player piano, listen to music boxes or attend a band organ rally. So we need to educate newcomers and build their interest.

Do you want your code reviewed for errors or improvements?

This would be fine with me.

Do you want design suggestions?

Yes. Especially on the homepage, as I am certain there is much room for improvement there.


Meta

[Blue]

Hi amica_webmaster,

I had no problem with navigation. I wondered about the redundancy of the "corridor entrance" pages (especially the titles)but then thought that might have been one of the visitor suggested enhancements?

I noticed that your font sizes are not fixed which is great for those with failing eyesight. However, you might want to rethink your use of font types. I'm not that familiar with Tahoma (used in your nav menus and titles) but you may want to consider switching to verdana. Here's why:

Verdana is especially legible at larger font sizes due to the spacing of the letters in combination with it's being a sans-serif font. Legibility studies show that verdana is very easy on the eyes for anything over 12pt.

As well, your body text is in times new roman. It is a serif font (for those who don't know, a serif font has the little horizontal lines at the tops and bottoms of each letter, which works great for print but due to the standard 72dpi of most monitors becomes harder to read on screen). I might suggest that you switch to arial for your body text as, again, arial (another sans-serif font) lead the legibility studies for font sizes of 12pt (verdana lead for smaller than 12 pt, BTW).

Home Page:

Player pianos ARE fun and since you're goal is to attract interested parties, or to incite non-interested parties to become interested, I think you need to throw in a little "spice".

Maybe showcase some "fun" photos of happy people gathered around a player piano singing along to the music. Something inviting. Something motivating.

How about a pizza parlour player piano photo? When I was a kid, I used to love going to the pizza parlour and having the player piano play "Winchester Cathedral". It sure piqued my interest. It was, in fact, a player piano that motivated me to make a career out of music!

Since the sentences towards the bottom of the page are newsworthy, maybe make them look so by making them bulleted. It naturally draws the eye.

Inner pages:

Some of your pages are long, and include a sub-menu for that page. I would consider adding "top" or "top of page" or "menu" links (I think they would go great in the section divider headings, aligned right).

You might consider carrying-over the background shading of moused-over links to all your links, though they already stand out.

For the "corridor entrance" pages, again I think a little spice would be nice. They're rather bland as is.

******

You've got lot's of great information on the site, but it's presented in a sort of bland way. Spice it up a little (don't overdo it) and I think it'll be a winner.

As an aside, some of the players that recorded those fantastic player piano rolls were simply amazing. More times than not, a single individual sounded like TWO people were playing. WOW!

[scottiecl]

Good job with the questions, Meta!

OK- first question- what is with the splash page?

Second- you have a very impressive page rank! Especially since I only see one external back link. I would think you should be able to get DMOZ and Go Guides listings with no problem as well as Zeal. Your site is an excellent example of a high PR site with few external links. Good job!

Third- On the design- do you have any images? To me, this site ought to be fun! I would think something like a piano keyboard image down the side would jazz things up a bit. Tables would help you to organize your information into columns.

If nothing else, I would add headings on the home page to break up your text. "AMICA 2003 Convention in Portland Oregon" and "AMICA's making news" would look great as a bold headers or in colored headers the same as the interior pages. (The font on your colored headers is kind of hard to read. You might try removing the small caps variant so that there is more whitespace in the letters themselves.)

Usability- If you are aiming for the older generation, try to keep all your information "above the fold" so that they don't have to scroll if possible. There seems to be some extra spage between your top navigation block and the bottom one that could be removed to give you some more room for content.

Ok a little more searching and I find some really neat images (although many are broken... see http://www.amica.org/organ_corridor/organ_corridor_band_organ.html ) How about featuring a great picture in your nav elements? There are some very easy javascript rotation scripts that can pull a random image so that you can feature as many pictures as you want- everytime a new page is clicked, another image is shown at random. It just adds a little interest and may draw the visitor further into the site.

You could have a lot of fun with the design on this one while still keeping things clean, organized, and simple.

[sanity]

Hi Meta,

Thanks for taking the time to read Scottie's guidelines.

First I also wonder about that splash page. I suggest removing it.

Your site looks good at both 800 x 600 and 1024 x 768 on IE6.

You've a nice, simple design that's already quite usable. I do have a couple of suggestions though:

Remove the all caps from your navigation options. All caps are difficult to read (harder for the eye to scan) and you want to make it as easy as possible for your users to find what they're looking for.

I think Blue's suggestion of changing the body font is a good one. I'd suggest either Arial or Verdana. Whichever you choose I'd probably stick to it for the navigation too for consistency. You can always bold the nav to show it is different.

The text lines are very long. Perhaps have a play with putting your copy in a table where you can then add white space to each side. Or try a 2 column layout. The longer the line of text the more difficult it is for the user to read. Especially for those at higher monitor resolutions.

I also like Scottie's suggestion of including some photos. Sometimes a picture tells a thousand words and all that. :)

Let us know how you go.

Sophie

[amica_webmaster]

Thank you all for the constructive and specific suggestions!

Let me address some of the questions you have raised. When Scottie asked "what is with the splash page?" she was writing what I was aking myself. The site that you see is a replacement of the organizations previously existing site,which was full of great stuff, but the great stuff was totally oriented toward current members. It ranked very low (read: nowhere) for the terms we care about most, such as "player piano" and "player pianos." So at the time, having a page that was totally focused on player pianos - saying that we're interested in them and defining them, seemed like a good idea.

The redesigned site went up last June, but I have not submitted it anywhere, because I haven't completed what I considered Phase I of the redesign. All the pages are there, but as Scottie pointed out, some links don't work - that's because I haven't even obtained some of the images that I mean to post yet (yeah, that's really slow, but this is not my day job.) And yet - our rank on the term "player pianos" is now 3 and 4 on Google.

The splash page is not the one that got that rank though, and now I am looking to replace it with something better. With images, certainly. One thing that has me completely confused though, is how I would go about removing it. The index (http://www.amica.org) page links to another page (the lobby http://www.amica.org/amica/amica_player_piano_lobby.htm) which is a more typical home page style. The lobby page is located in a folder. An obvious option is to flush the splash page and use the lobby. But I'm not sure of the right way to manage such a change in terms of minimizing code changes, not removing urls and any other issues I ought to consider. So any suggestions on how to approach that would be welcome.

I'm going to start trying out those font suggestions right away!

[scottiecl]

To explain my comments about the backlinks...

I used the Google toolbar to check backlinks from your home page which is NOT really your home page, the splash page is the root domain.

You have tons of inbound links- you have one to the "lobby" page. Sorry about that! Simply sloppiness on my part. :)

Great site! I wish you the best with it.