Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

I have designed a site, using Yahoo Small Business Tools, to attract people to visit the Philippines for medical treatment, combined with a vacation in this tropical, beautiful country, i.e medical tourism.
http://philippinehealthtours.com/
After 8 months on the web it is not doing well.
Comments please on the design, keywords and SEO. Also any advice on marketing the site without a long e-mail list will be very welcome.

Two problems come to mind. The first is that the whole site is like a very tall, vertical tube. There`s so much white space on the left and right, with a lot of scrolling, that it`s unpleasant.

The second is that you have several underlined areas, and people consider those to be links. They`re not, which make for some additional annoyances.

Your text is way too large, and could easily be reduced by probably 50%. But that`s not the main issue.

I think it`s that the Philipines isn`t known for high-quality medical care. If indeed people can get that sort of care, then the site is going to have to first gain credibility. You`re going to have to have some more sophisticated graphics, maybe images of gleaming, clean buildings and professional-looking medical people.

Having a cartoon of a palm-tree island, right below some frightening images of scalpels and medical instruments is off-putting. I`m thinking you may do well to consider having a professional design-layout person work with a developer.

What is your definition of "not doing so well"?

Yahoo`s sitebuilder is not SEO friendly .... creates a lot of code that you could do without, so it isn`t great for SEO .... if you keep using it, then you need to do more for titles, descriptions, keyword rich content, h1/h2 tags .... the basics of onsite SEO.

Visually, the site lacks .... theres is no tight layout ... it`s like it just sits there instead of doing anything, which is to interest the viewer .... images are fine but not cartoon images in a medical-related site .... that instantly loses credibility for you ....

I`d say hire a designer or at least get a nice premade template to build on and forget the Yahoo builder .... work on your content ....read up on basic SEO and implement it.



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M Hall
Website Critique Community
International Society of Curmudgeons

ALSTON DESIGN, website and Flash design is our specialty ;)


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Mark Styrczula
Creative Director
ALSTONDESIGN Chicago Flash & Website design