Following our recent blogs on directory design and integrity I was asked if I’d do a review, and whether good or bad, that we could publish it. We did take the time to notify the directory owner who might by the time you get to read this review have dealt with most if not all of the issues. That’s assuming he wants to.

Thanks go out to the owner of the Directory under review Jude, ( better know as popotalk)

Dirsensei Web Directory
TECHNICAL DATA: Speed of loading (nb: There can be a fluction on download times). for further information on this use the same software that I did here.

Connection Rate Download Time
14.4K - 117.02 seconds
28.8K - 60.01 seconds
33.6K - 51.86 seconds
56K - 32.32 seconds
ISDN 128K - 11.98 seconds
T1 1.44Mbps - 3.78 seconds

This is not good. The general consensus within the design industry for many years suggest that a website should load within 5-8 seconds or risk losing potential visitors. Not everyone has ISDN, in fact most still have good old fashioned cable so its critical you get your site to load as fast as possible without compromising on quality. This site had 13 images in it which can either be optimized or reduced. The test I ran suggested replacing graphic rollovers with CSS rollovers to speed display and minimize HTTP requests amongst other things.

CSS Validation - Failed, I have to admit that this was the first time I’ve seen a CSS failure so far in this study, there were only 3 errors though which should be addressed. 28 Warning were found but again these can all be easily fixed.

HTML Validation - Failed, There were 10 errors in all, each of these are again very easily fixed.

Keyword use worried me. The word ‘Directory’ is used 61 times, the word ‘dirsensei’ 40, this really should be addressed as a matter of priority. You may well get away with this keyword stuffing for now, but my honest opinion is to never tempt fate. Ask yourself is there really any need for that many?

DESIGN

All the key links to ‘Add Site’ etc were in the correct spot, I’m not a big fan of the ‘popular site’ gimmick, but that’s a personal choice.

The logo was fine but the slogan below should be changed. ‘Quality and Powerful Backlinks’ tells me that its possibly aimed at the webmaster seeking Pr or link juice? If your going to make a claim like that in your logo, you’d better make sure that it actually delivers what it says. In this case at present I don’t think it does. Further to that, the extra scrutiny currently placed on directories by Google would suggest that re-wording would be a good thing.

Initial impressions of the design were that it was clean and to the point, there was no excessive content to detract from the main purpose of the site, that being a directory. The choice of colors could cause a problem though as font and background are far too similar. If a browser had their monitor set at high contrast or brightness would cause the text to disappear into the background. Simply darkening the text to a navy blue or similar would solve this problem and won’t detract from the overall design.

Category structure was good, although as a rule the index page should try and avoid scrolling. This isn’t always possible but I tested this on a 19″ monitor set at 1280 x 1024 so it really shouldn’t have. There are 20 main categories on the index page which in my opinion isn’t really necessary, less is more comes to mind here. It could be argued that more main categories could attract more custom to the top level, but it can also have an adverse affect on visitor usage. In other words, when a visitor is forced to ‘drill down’ into sub categories they are invited to see other categories and links within these, that’s always going to increase your chance of a longer visit.

I found the text in the side bars was poorly formatted, at the time of review the text was ‘absolute left’ hitting the border of the tables. This makes for difficult reading and looks untidy. Text should always be at least 1px away from the wall of the table, and if possible justified.

CHOICE OF TEXT

There is a danger of verbosity when writing a description, for example in the introduction this site uses the words ‘Our primary purpose’, this is not only bad English its verbose, a simple ‘Our main purpose’ would do. Remember your audience, don’t try and over impress them, simple methods are often the most effective. Be careful on the wording of the text, if you make a statement that you provide something your going to have to work hard to maintain that. Use of more pliable words such as we will ’strive’, or ‘endeavor’ gives you a ‘get out’ because your not actually saying your offering something, your saying your going to ‘try’. Sounds petty, it isn’t, its a very shrewd method of marketing.

By the time I reached the tools are, I started to notice several references to ‘dirsensei’, I got the feeling the name was being over promoted. This may have been a personal thing for me but what could happen is that the search engines would see this as being potential spamming of a word. In the source code the word ‘Dirsensei’ was used no less than 40 times. Keeping it simple is the order of the day, there really is no need to keep referring to your own name. Simple methods like ‘Our Blog’, ‘PageRank Checker’, and so on would be just as effective, if not more so. If you are going to use this method with your directory name at least use it so the search engines like it.

For example your source code showed <h3><strong>Dirsensei Blog & SEO Tools</strong></a></h3> but you should try and utilize CSS more, your code would look like this then; <h3>Dirsensei Blog & SEO Tools</h3> This would do two things, reduce the amount of code in your page which helps the spiders. It was brought to my attention that the use of your domain name in your content, so I might stand to be corrected on this part.

LINKING

One of the major problems at the moment is the use of links and the creation of bad neighborhoods, while the four links to the ‘Network’ of sites, use a better choice of words perhaps. I’d go for, ‘Why not visit’, that way your not being seen to ‘over promote’. Subliminal linking is far more powerful than people give it credit and is far more effective than in your face techniques.

Finally to the alleged ‘neighborhood links’ or ‘bad neighbourhood’ links, well at least that’s how Google apparently view three of these sites as they all got hit a 0 on PR. (Ignore this part if you don’t take Google into account), but I don’t see the point of a directory advertising a rival directory, this isn’t meant as a criticism, but you’d never see a sports shop advertising another sports shop on its site would you? The same principle applies to directories. Better use of these advert spaces would be to encourage non directory advertisers to use them, such as submission services, or SEO companies, this won’t be easy to achieve with a low traffic site so perhaps putting free charity sites there would be a better idea.

Call it a loss leader if you like, you might not make any money from them but you’ll gain a lot of credibility from the ones you give the free links to, and you may even benefit from people doing keyword searches for the sites you’ve linked to who otherwise would never have know you existed.

I noticed the lack of ‘Policy’, and ‘Terms’, these are important features of a site and every one should have these. They aren’t the same as guidelines, they relate to more to the use of the site as a whole. Offering this kind of information goes a long way to giving you credibility and portrays a more professional image.

Finally, the reference to the number of editors for the directory. This is a personal choice but I’d avoid making reference to this. I’m not disputing that you may well have that amount of editors but I’ll be very surprised if others won’t question that. This is opening you up to question on why your content is limited when you have so many editors? It could also be seen as you trying to ‘inflate’ your directory to something its not. Its irrelevant that you may well have that many editors, the fact is that the SEO company won’t believe you and it could even put them off submitting. My advice is again, less is more. It’s different with links and categories, they can be checked, and its pretty much par for the course to see this kind of thing.

S UMMARY

A good directory that appears to be trying a little too hard to promote itself. Some small design issues and less emphasis on self promotion is all that is needed to bring this up to a higher level.

Disclaimer: Please understand that this isn’t meant as an exhaustive analasys, anyone who participate and gets reviewed here will also get a free SEO report using the latest state of the art software. The comments above are purley an observational critique, nothing more. Some of the tips are very important, some perhaps not so. You can be the judge.