David Fiske Affiliate marketing & web development musings from Fiske Towers

You may remember a few weeks ago I offered free website analysis for 5 lucky website owners. 2 very lucky website owners came forward with five sites between them.

So here goes!

Today's website analysis is for Chavs Test.

 


The above screenshot is taken from the home page. It's vital stats are a PageRank of 3 and an Alexa rating of 3,462,411. So, Google thinks it's fairly relevant but it does suffer from a lack of substantial traffic.

So, from a design perspective, what's right?

Firstly, the most obvious way to monetise the site is through AdSense. Apart from retailers of Burberry products, there is a limited number of monetising options so AdSense seems logical.

The AdSense ads are set up correctly in that the title is the same colour as the other hyperlinks and the body of the ad is set up as the same colour as the text on the page.

The quizzes themselves are funny. It turns out I'm 41% chav and I even got a button to display on my site, which is great viral marketing.



On the results page, there are links off to even more quizzes so traffic from one site can quite easily equate to traffic on another. This is good because there are more opportunities for your visitors to see your marketing message.

From a techy perspective, the CSS validates so thumbs up here.

Here's the bad stuff!

The page claims to be XHTML Transitional yet it fails to validate. This could cause cross-browser problems and is not best practise. Wherever possible, try and validate your code to either XHTML Transitional or XHTML Strict. The reason being that if you can design to standards, the chances are people won't have as many problems with your code. Sometimes it's a pain getting the code just right but it's worth it in the long run.

A speed test threw up some warnings but nothing majorly concerning.

The AdSense seems a little too much. I would personally remove some of the ad blocks. Many AdSense gurus preach that you should use the maximum amount of ads allowed but sometimes that clutters and constricts your page. Plus, the more ad units you have, the weaker the adverts themselves. Google usually places the strongest ads in the first ad unit to be called and works down.

The font on your page should be Arial to match that in the AdSense blocks.

There is a block on the right hand side that advertises AdSense. I think this should be removed on the basis that the people who view the site probably don't have a website. Perhaps they do but the ad stands out like a sore thumb and looks out of place.

I'm also not sure about the friend finder. Perhaps this works but I perceive the website audience to be kids and teens. Perhaps I am wrong but that is where I would target.

As for the design itself, it looks dull and a tad boring. I would focus on making it look more chavvy. So, a Burberry cloth background may work well if done correctly. Maybe some more pictures of chavs. Perhaps some more content pages that explains what chavs are. I fondly remember a conversation in a lecture a while back where a French student didn't know what a chav was. You could target more people by explaining what the site is all about.

Why not use a feed aggregator and parse news headlines with the word "chav" in there? These could be a sticky feature.

The way forward

OK, I would like to see the following:

• Validated pages
• A new template that is chavvy
• Less AdSense
• More content pages

Alternative ads that may be worth looking into:

• Mobile phone content providers
• Burberry clothes retailers
• Argos (apparently!)
• Cashback websites
• "free ipod" type sites
• Competition sites

I also thought a rough design may inspire so here goes! It's an ugly duckling of a website but nevertheless, it's colourful and chavvy.



One thing I got from designing this is that if you do a search on Google, there's lots of funny content you can link to, such as the chav car or chavopoly.

Also, Tradedoubler are running a campaign for ecards at the moment. You get paid for signing up people for a free service. Goes hand in hand with what you are offering.

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