Horses on the Beach

[tacimala]

This isn't exactly a clear cut "I need critiquing for my site" but I didn't want to post in another section of the forum and have someone else get mad at me. OK here's how the story goes. St. Joseph, Michigan started a tourism project on Memorial Day Weekend. Much like Chicago's painted cows a few years ago, St. Joseph brought out horses painted and sponsored by local artists and businesses to line the streets of the downtown area. The sybmolism behind the horses is because of the carousel in the amusement park down at Silver Beach on Lake Michigan from many years ago. Now, to promote this project, the city has spent thousands of dollars on advertising by purchasing billboards, printing brochures and running text ads in newspapers within a several hundred mile radius. However, they definitely have overlooked the power of the internet as a good advertising resource as they only have a limited display on the city site.

Being that my site is a community driven website for the area and businesses in the area can advertise on my site, I took the initiative for the city and built a slide show and online exhibit of the horses and incorporated this into my site to help get some added PR and to give the horses a place on the internet to help drive tourism in the area over the summer.

Now here's where it gets tricky. Here is my page for Horses on the Beach (http://www.gokzoo.com/community/st-joseph/carousel-horses/). I developed the page so that it had a good amount of information for the user and also an easy to use slide show with some nice pictures of all of the horses. From what I know of search engine optimization, I did what I could to boost the page's rankings towards the top, but it didn't work as well as the other pages on my site. The questions I pose now for everyone are:
1) Can anyone see a good way to better optimize the pages for search engines?
2) Are the pages easy to use and well designed so that those viewing the site will have a proper browsing experience?
3) Going out on a limb here, but does anyone want to link to the carousel horses page to help improve PR? (I'm not asking for a link to my main page, but only to the pages for the horses so that the city may find them and take better notice.)

Thanks for reading folks, I know it's a bit long but I wanted to get the whole story down. I'm just trying to make this a great attraction for the area so any help from you would help out a lot!

[Jade Dragon]

Url?

[tacimala]

I anchored the link above in the "Horses on the Beach" but the URL itself is http://www.gokzoo.com/community/st-joseph/carousel-horses/

[YvetteKuhns]

I love carousels. The painted horses are beautiful. You may want to exchange links with other sites for carousels, horses, amusement rides, family entertainment or others with a similar target audience. Also consider adding a donation link.

Many travel sites would consider exchanging links with you. One of my clients has a travel site and I can suggest your site to her. It would appear on the page about travel to Michigan.

Your slide show is nice, but the image file sizes are large. They may take some time to load for some people. Consider reducing the file size for each image.

As for search engine optimization, each web page should have a title, keywords and a description that is customized for that page. You may need to include more text on each page that displays images since search engines read text and not images.

You may consider adding carousel music for ambience. Make the music optional and not looping. More than one song playing while viewing the slide show could be fun. Using a Flash slide show would protect the images while allowing music to be included and optional.

Vote for your favorite horse - If you could allow someone to click the name or image of a horse and have the info associated with that vote to be transferred to the form, that would be easier for visitors. Just a suggestion. If not, have the vote open in a new window so the visitor can refer back to the horse for which he/she is voting.

Nice site. Nice horses. Makes me want to go there. :)

[tacimala]

Hi Yvette, thanks for the detailed reply! Last night I actually started gathering links for other carousel type sites that may want to promote an event of this kind, but using travel sites is a great idea! I will have to add that to my link request adventure for the week. Please do pass on the link to your friend if you think she could use it; I'd appreciate it for sure!

For the images, do you think I should sacrifice the clarity of the images for download time? I do agree that they are somewhat large files, but I wanted the pictures to retain their beauty as much as possible. Also another way to resolve that type of problem would be to put up a warning message on the preview pages with the thumbnails that the full size images on the slide show are large and will take longer to download. Would you consider that as a more viable option in this instance?

For the search engine optimization, all of the search engines have picked up only the main pages for the site, so just the link that I gave above. I'd almost prefer them to find just the main page rather than an individual page, but if optimizing the interior pages of the slide show would strengthen the main page, I would consider doing that. Do you think that would happen?

Good advice on the voting procedure. From the beginning of the project I wanted to be able set the vote up like that, but I have a limited knowledge of PHP and I wouldn't know how to do that otherwise. :(

Thanks for the insight, an outside perspective is always nice!

[YvetteKuhns]

I think you can use a thumbnail for each image and allow a choice of quicker-loading or the higher quality image. I would choose the higher quality image, but those using dialup may choose the quicker loading image.

Though you may prefer people entering the site through the main page, any way to get your site found at all is a blessing. The main page has the most text and will have the best results anyway. And each page could strengthen the overall ranking of the other pages.

<form action="votingscript.php" method="post" name="voteform">
<input type="hidden" name="vote" value="Pretty Horse">
<input type="submit" value="Vote for Pretty Horse.">
</form>

This code will show a simple form button for the visitor to click. It will submit the value "Pretty Horse" to the votingscript.php form script. Change the values to whatever you want.

[tacimala]

Well I'm currently using a somewhat redesigned version of AlienForm for my form submission. Would I be able to pass a variable like that using HTML forms? I know I could make a new form for each horse that has that variable filled in, but that would be a lot of clutter.

[YvetteKuhns]

Put the source code I posted with each horse listed at http://www.gokzoo.com/community/st-joseph/carousel-horses/ .

The value should be passed to your form which is currently http://www.gokzoo.com/community/st-joseph/carousel-horses/horse-vote.htm but should be renamed horse-vote.php. Within the horse-vote.php form code you should include this code:

<input type="hidden" name="urlis" value="<?php echo $vote; ?>">

to pass the value from horse-vote.php to
your php email form processing script as specified in your form action.