Chris Blackwell’s Domain

I am now taking new submissions for this week’s “site of the week”. If you would like your website to be featured on Friday with a small review then please submit your site now. To submit your site please go to my contact page, fill out the form, and put “Site of the Week” in the subject line. Include your URL and a small description of what your site is about. I look forward to seeing all the submissions and best of luck to everyone!

I am starting a new feature this week called “Website of the Week”. I love promoting small blogs that are starting out or haven’t hit a good number of subscribers yet. I want to hear about your site so I can showcase it on my website. Every week I will pick the best (hand selected) of all the blogs and/or websites that are emailed to me. I will post the best from each week as a featured review on this site every Friday.

To participate, go to my contact page and fill out the contact form with the subject “Site of the Week”. The winner will be posted Friday morning. If you are not selected one week, please resubmit your site for the next week. Good luck to everyone and I can’t wait to see all the exciting websites that you will be sending to me.

I have officially launched the Novo Emporium (www.novoemporium.com) website today! Novo Emporium is a site that I have been working on for a few months. I always wanted to create a website dedicated to business and marketing, and now I have. The design of Novo Emporium is not the greatest and I am going to get one of our designers to put together something better as soon as possible. My main focus was (and always will be) the content.

Novo Emporium? What’s in a name?

The name Novo Emporium is the latin phrase for “new market”. I spent a lot of time thinking about what I wanted to call this website. I knew that I wanted the site to be new and fresh, and not talk about old style marketing strategies, because that’s not my thing. I spent weeks playing around with different domains with the words marketing and the word new. Finally it came to me that the web uses a lot of latin phrases. In fact, place holder text, that most web designers use, is latin (Lorem Ipsum). I finally decided on Novo Emporium a few weeks ago and I haven’t looked back since.

Since it took me several months to finally decide on the name for the website, I was able to build up a good amount of content for it. I will talk in another post about the necessity to build-up content before launching a new blog or website. Please take a look at the site and let me know what you think. I look forward to hearing your comments.

WebsiteGrader.com is a new web tool that grades your website based on the marketing effectiveness of your site. I’ve been playing with the site over the last couple of days and it seems to do a pretty good job on grading websites and informing websites owners on what they need to change. The web tool is made by HubSpot, who I am sure are using it as a promotional tool for their business. I can’t say I blame them and I believe that tools like this are a great way to promote your business.

Positives

The site is very well laid out and doesn’t waste your time with too many options or clicks. As soon as you get to the home screen you are presented with a form that has you put in your website URL. There are three optional fields that follow and that can help improve your report quality. Entering keywords will provide the basis of your site report and on how well your site ranks for the listed terms. The second field allows you to put in the competitors website so your report will display a competitive analysis of your competitors sites. The final field is for putting in your email address if you want to receive updates and/or have the report emailed to you.

The report itself is extremely well laid out and easy to read. The report is broken down into On-Page SEO, Off-Page SEO, Blog Analysis, Social Networking popularity, and your competitive analysis. The sub-sections are broken down very well. The report lists number of header tags, duplicates of H1 tags as warnings, image alt tag analysis, Google PageRank, and so much more than I could go into here.

Negatives

The site seems to be slow to update it’s grades of a website. One site I tested scored a 83% and the Website Grader made some recommendations to improve. I made the recommendations and went back to the Website Grader page to try out the new changes. The changes did not appear on the resubmissions which leads me to believe that the website indexes the sites that have been “graded” and takes a while to refresh them. This is a problem for people who are trying to tweak their site on the fly and I hope HubSpot will fix this problem shortly.

Conclusion

Website Grader is an excellent tool for anyone who has created a website and needs to check how their site appeals to a search engine. The site is tailored more towards beginners to intermediate users. I would love to see this service expanded into a professional offering with more features and advanced reporting. Overall I think this is a great initial launch and I have to congratulate HubSpot on a job well done.