Minisites - comparison of two sites

[vizzo]

Two sites in the same niche - both launched 3 months ago
http://www.become-a-driving-instructor.org.uk (Site 1)
http://drivinginstructorjobs.org.uk (Site 2)

Site 1 built for me for £60 by someone using wordpress
Some errors of fact and spelling in the text(!)
1,600 local monthly exacts.
Nowhere in Google for url keywords
11 backlinks
Virtually no real traffic

Site 2 built by me in Dreamwever
880 local exacts
Position 2 of page 1 in Google for url keywords
3 backlinks
Around 100 unique visitors per month

Some possible alternative conclusions:
1. It's all luck which sites do well
2. Wordpress minisites don't work so well
3. It's better for people who know about the subject to write the text
4. Dashes in urls are a major disadvantage
5. It's easier to rank well and get traffic for keywords with lower monthly exacts
6. There are other factors that I haven't considered

 

[cc976a]

Questions I'd be asking would be:

1. The quality of the 3 inbound to site 2 compared to the quality of the 11 backlinks to site 1

2. Are they hosted on the same shared server or different (and if different is one on a shared server, same IP, with other sites causing ranking problems)

3. Competition on both keywords being more fierce for URL for site 1


I personally have never found Wordpress particuarly great for SERPs (although i'm sure many others would disagree) and really avoid hyphens now.

Spelling mistakes may not help.

You may never find the answer but always useful to see stats such as these

 

[seanc]

imho http://drivinginstructorjobs.org.uk/ is the better site.

if i hit http://www.become-a-driving-instructor.org.uk/ i wouldnt even read it.
its just text with a poorly integrated adsense (background is not even the same colour scheme!)

http://drivinginstructorjobs.org.uk/ stands out more, is easier to read and the add's blend in.

thats my 2p worth anyway....

 

[retired_member32]

personally i would remove the DSA and DVLA logo's ,they wouldn't take to kindly using their logo's....do you have a fixed length on the page layout ,i get errors on the text at the bottom of drivinginstructorjobs.org.uk

Mark

 

[techtimmy]

I've generally found that my Wordpress sites get more visitors than my hand coded sites!

I put this down to Wordpress self sitemap generation,seo plugin, and rss feeds

 

[vizzo]

Seanc - I agree about the look of the designs - the wordpress one was done by someone who advertised on this forum and who seemed to have a good track record with getting good rankings with minisites!
However my main point is more about traffic. The non-dashed site gets a lot more.
Delia -theres no dsa logo but you're right about the dvla one which i've removed. I've tested in IE8, FFox and Chrome and don't get any errors so not sure about that.
Certainly the experiment of hetting someone else to do the Wordpress site seems to have backfired - i won't be going down that route again!

 

[AssetDomains]

Apart from the adds in the text I actually prefare the wordpress theme style wise.
As for wordpress my sites seem to get indexed much faster when I build them around wordpress and I have a couple of niche co.uk ranking very high without a single back link or any offsite seo.
As for geting someone else to build it in wordpress just say payment on satisfactory completion shouldnt be a problem for any decent provider for such a small price.

 

[droid]

I like both designs but prefer site 2.

Have you noticed that the home link isn't working though on site 2 ? (all pages)

Gary

 

[retired_member32]

i get this at the bottom

 

[vizzo]

Thanks for that. Could you tell me What browser are you using?

 

[retired_member32]

Internet explorer 8

 

[Pred]

second site looks good, professional etc

as someone said, quality of the backlinks would make a difference too

first site is as ugly as ive ever seen a site tbh
worst wordpress design ever. doesnt make sense to pay someone that and use a crappy free theme

instead of wasting £60, you could have bought a gorgeous theme for like $35 and used on as many sites as you wanted with licence.
if you cant install them, someone on np or dnf would install for like $10. im sure you can though. maybe used someone else purely to save on time, which is fair enough.

wordpress does amazingly well imho, so it wont be wordpress, just content, layout design, backlinks etc

sorry to sound harsh, just being honest

will say again i think the site you did is very clean and looks very professional
looks official even, if you lost the adsense

oh, and last point, don't use brits for design and development, imho unreliable, pricy and no dress sense lol
sure will offend but ive never been let down by this theory

go over to another forum, like np. as much as crappy domain forum, they have a lot of really good designers and developers, who are cheap with amazing design skills

digitalpoint etc too full of scammers and dnf doesnt have enough developers/designers