Review my website ZippyGame.com

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tomsace
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Posts: 167
Joined: Thu Jan 01, 2009 8:07 pm

Review my website ZippyGame.com

Post by tomsace »

Hey,
My website is http://www.zippygame.com.
I have now been working on my website for a few months, please take a look around and tell me what you think about it and where I can improve. I know there aren't alot of games but thats all I have left to do on my todo list!
Please leave any comments below.

Tom.
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Gabriel
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Re: Review my website ZippyGame.com

Post by Gabriel »

Your URL structure could be better designed. Try not to use id as a parameter since some search engines will ignore these URLs when indexing pages. A better idea would be to use "clean" URLs to go from this:

Code: Select all

categories.php?id=adventure&sort=name
To this:

Code: Select all

categories/adventure/name
In addition, it's common to use htaccess to redirect visitors going to mysite.com to www.mysite.com. This will help with making sure your website uses only one form of the two and stops duplicates in search results (along with bad rankings for duplicate content). You'd want this in your .htaccess file:

Code: Select all

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mysite.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mysite.com/$1 [L,R=301]
The great thing about this is, your visitors will be redirected to the full URL, not just the domain.

Also, your layout's code is outdated. I suggest upgrading to XHTML and tableless layouts. While the website may look nice, the code looks freshly generated by Photoshop's web exporter. Other than those little suggestions, your website looks nice, it has a clean layout, and you're doing a great job.
tomsace
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Posts: 167
Joined: Thu Jan 01, 2009 8:07 pm

Re: Review my website ZippyGame.com

Post by tomsace »

Wow thanks alot you have been great help.
I have added the code to the htaccess file now it redirects them to the full url!
Just finished changing to search engine friendly URL's too and it all works great!

Any more reviews/ideas anyone??
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Gabriel
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Location: Las Vegas

Re: Review my website ZippyGame.com

Post by Gabriel »

You should make a robots.txt, setup a dynamic Google sitemap, and add alt tags to your thumbnails and other graphics on your site. Also, your contact form goes to a misspelled file sendeail.php with no formatting for the page when there are missing fields. And there's also a missing space in "Thankyou" on your thank you page. Also, your form stores information such as the user agent, IP address, referral urls, and other information in hidden fields which should not be trusted. You should also add a CAPTCHA. It's fairly easy to use reCAPTCHA for this.
tomsace
Forum Contributor
Posts: 167
Joined: Thu Jan 01, 2009 8:07 pm

Re: Review my website ZippyGame.com

Post by tomsace »

Hi, I have changed the contact form, I was meaning to do that anyway but I forgot :P glad you reminded me :)
Anyway when a form is entered wrond or not entered at all the error is on the same page and remembers what the user entered so they don't have to re-fill out the form. But the problem I am having is the recaptcha, I got it to work fine but it was a bit too big, bulky and ugly looking on the site, so I have made my own.

It works! do you know how I can add more than one verification number to be allowed?
I have made it so the user has to input the value I select, which works but now I want to be able to let the user to input more than one verification code.
Anyway heres what I got:

Code: Select all

                 if(trim($spamcheck) != '354729')
                {
                    $error = 'The verification number you entered is wrong!';
                }
Is there a way of adding an 'or' in there so there is more than one code?

Tom.
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Gabriel
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Re: Review my website ZippyGame.com

Post by Gabriel »

reCAPTCHA allows customization so you can have just the verification or your own complete skin. What you want to do is use PHP to generate a random string of letters and numbers and store it in a session after generating an image to display to the visitor. Here's a tutorial on how to create a CAPTCHA.
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John Cartwright
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Re: Review my website ZippyGame.com

Post by John Cartwright »

Gabriel wrote:Your URL structure could be better designed. Try not to use id as a parameter since some search engines will ignore these URLs when indexing pages. A better idea would be to use "clean" URLs to go from this:
This misconception needs to die here today. This was probably true 5+ years ago, but since every crawler that I have come into contact with would read with query string without prejudice.

Although don't get me wrong. There are other benefits to using clean urls, this just isn't one of them.
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Gabriel
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Re: Review my website ZippyGame.com

Post by Gabriel »

John Cartwright wrote:This misconception needs to die here today. This was probably true 5+ years ago, but since every crawler that I have come into contact with would read with query string without prejudice.
True, I should have given a better point other than the URLs looking nicer. I do recall Google mentioning in their sitemap protocol to not use URLs with ids.
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John Cartwright
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Re: Review my website ZippyGame.com

Post by John Cartwright »

Oh I see what you were saying, my bad. Basically just to clarify things, query strings are ok to use, just specifically avoid using the key "ID" in the querystring.

Good ol Google dropped the ball there.
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