Evaluation

I am pleased with how my site turned out especially the look of the site. I am glad I didn't use my first design with the street image as my background. I think the painting background works well and fits in with the design of the site. I think I have completed all the tasks to the best of my ability and covered everything in the brief. I have a website that is designed for a particular target audience ie Art lovers, artists etc. I have included data analysis and site optimisation as mentioned in the brief. I have added php to my site in the form of a newsletter and content management system. However I still struggled with php and needed help from others to add it to my site. I am very thankfull for their help and support they know who they are.

At the time of writing up my evaluation I didn't have any search engines as traffic sources. This was due to the fact my site wasn't up on google although I had registered it a few weeks ago it just wasn't up yet. So I decided to register with other search engines to see if my site would go up and it did finally go up in bing a couple of days ago. I now have 3.39% views in search engine traffic with 55.37% in direct traffic and 41.24% in referring sites. Below are my new traffic sources and keywords results to date.

I also have more people viewing my site from around the world since my site as gone up in bing. I now have 171 views from the UK, 3 in the USA and 1 in Australia, Spain and Germany. Below are my map overlays to date.

What would I improve

If i had to start this brief again I think the only thing I would add to improve the site more would be a gallery of the artists work. I would have small thumbnails of their work that when clicked on would take the user to a large picture of that artists work with a description underneath of what the artwork is. Apart from that I don't think I would change anything else about my site.

Please visit my site at http://www.mfweb02.artdesignhull.ac.uk

Robot Txt File

I have added a robots.txt file to my site files to stop search engines finding my site in their searches. I did this because my site is not the official studio eleven site. However I did take the robots txt file off for a couple of weeks so search engines could find my site.

This is the code I used to stop search engines finding my site

User-agent:*

Disallow:/

* = Select all search engines

/ = Disallows access to the site

And this is the code to allow search engines to find my site

User-agent:*

Allow:/

* = Select all search engines

/ = Allow access to the site

The Bounce Rate

The bounce rate shows the percentage of visitors who visited the site but didn't stay and look at every page. If I look at this further I can see that 33.63% of the visitors looked at the index page and 21.93% visited the gallery artists page.

Map Overlay

The map overlay is a map of the world that shows you where the visitors to your site are looking at it from around the world. Looking at the map overlay for my site I can see I have had visitors from all over the UK and from Germany and the USA. This can then be broken down to see for instance which cities my site was viewed in the UK.

Looking at the table above I can see I had 89 visitors from Hull and 29 in London with 1 coming from Halesowen.

Google Analytics

I used Google Analytics to see how much traffic or visitors had visited my site. The diagram below shows the amount of visitors my site had. I had 64.49% in Direct Traffic which means the visitors found my site by typing in the URL in the browser and going directly to the site.

I had 34.51% in Referring Sites which means they found my site through a link or another site. Looking at this further I can see 24.65% came from my Facebook link.

Looking into this further I can see what browsers people used to find my site. So by looking at this information I can see 64.79% of the visitors to my site used Firefox and only 2.11% used Chrome.

Keywords

Keywords are words and phrases that describe the content of each page on your site you want to promote. They should describe your sites content and subject which will help your site get promoted in Google. I added keywords to my site to help improve my SEO.

Keywords I added

Here's a list of the keywords I added: studio eleven, studio, art, gallery, humber, street, fruit, market, hull, local, artists, rob moore, rob, moore, adele howitt, adele, howitt, ceramics, painter, exhibitions.

ALT tags

I also added ALT tags to some of the images on my site. ALT tags are good for people who are visually impaired because they help describe the image to them by using a screen reader. The screen reader reads out the information about the image telling the user what the image is. Below is an example of the ALT tag for the painting below so the reader would read out painting by Rob Moore to the visually impaired person.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) helps improve the amount of traffic that goes to your website from search engines. There are two types of SEO they are On Site and Off Site.

On Site

On site SEO includes the Keywords, meta tags and all the relevant content for the site.

Off Site

Off site SEO is the external links to your site from other sites.