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Site doesn’t seem too slow to me (maybe you’ve already made improvements?), but could be optimized. I agree with the W3 Total Cache recommendation. You could do that first and then look at doing Cloudflare or other CDN to improve performance as a second step if you need it. Good starting settings are Page Caching (enable – to Disk Enhanced), Minify (enable – to Disk). That’s it. Leave everything else to default, turned off. You can do database and object caching, but I don’t think that is recommended unless you have a VPS or dedicated server.

I personally use the following sites to provide an objective performance measurement…

https://websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/and
https://developers.google.com/pagespeed/

I also use pingdom.com free account to monitor response time.

Your site wasn’t available when i just went and looked. I’m no SEO expert, but we’ve done OK with our own SEO for my site. Here are some thoughts…

I am a fan of the WordPress SEO plugin (by Yoast). It’s very helpful in reviewing the content of various pages for keywords as well as helping you get the headers and tags looking good.

I’m also a fan of using getlisted.org to help get your site submitted to various directories.

Thanks. I thought that was pretty cool too. It’s a widget-sidebar area built-in to the Karma theme.

The Karma theme is pretty polished and they do an excellent job of supporting it. I see there’s another update I haven’t yet uploaded (we’re on 2.6.5 of the theme, current version is 2.6.6).

404 is a generic server error

wp-login-php is the wrong address it should work with .php instead of -php
wp-login.php

or I just login as site/wp-admin

Dave

Looks like you’ve got a lot of good content.

In terms of of “better template”… I see that you are using the twentyeleven theme which is a great theme with all sorts of flexibility. A few years ago, we brought our company website in house and have it on WordPress. It’s been great! Isn’t WordPress awesome?

We made the decision to go with paid (but very reasonably priced) themes off of themeforest.net. We browsed the wordpress templates, sorted by sales to see the popular themes and purchased from there. We’re on our third theme and each theme has been great! One of the nice things about WordPress is that you can update your theme to refresh your site without sacrificing your content (granted, we had some update work to do on the site every time). Our current theme is called Karma (we started out on Twicet, then Awake, now Karma – all great themes, we were just looking for different/updated things each time – we’ve also used In Focus and Striking themes for a few other sites). I think we paid $35 for Karma on our [link moderated] site, which for us was no big deal (especially when we had an issue with it, and got prompt support from the provider). We really like the features. This particular theme is currently regularly upgraded and may work for us for years to come. If not, we can swap it out for another theme again (likely from themeforest, since I personally love the themes on themeforest, but there are are other places out there as well).

While I’ve seen many amazing sites on twentyeleven, there are many sources for themes both free and low-cost. If you are looking for “better template” as you say, might be worth exploring all of the free or inexpensive themes out there.

My $0.02…

Dave

I like the look of the sites. In particular, the background on the first site jhkbdesign.co.uk is subtle, but very cool.

One issue with that site, though, is that it appears to have a problem on the Contact link where some text is showing up partially behind the form.

Other than that issue, looks great to me!

One follow up comment. Lest I be acused of the pot calling the kettle black… I still have stock photography on my site, but I’ve reduced it and I’m trying to eliminate it as much as possible.

I see it everywhere and after seeing stuff I have on my site on other people’s sites, decided to begin a mission to eliminate it and go more personal. Once again, just my $0.02…

It looks like a good start to the 2primemarketing.com website. It’s obviously not finished, but the colors and layout look OK.

Personal impression…. the big turn-off to me is going with stock photography. It’s everywhere and it’s not very personal. We just recently redid our site to try to get rid of as much stock photography as possible and make our site as approachable and personal as possible in an effort to get people to see it, get a certain comfort level, and call us.

We just launched the update last week. totalnetworks.com

We are a Phoenix IT Support company. WordPress 3.1, using a theme called Awake.

My $0.02… would appreciate feedback from others on our site as well. Got good constructive feedback from www.remarpro.com the last time I posted here.

Thanks everyone for the feedback. We’ve been in business since 1986, but had been outsourcing our website design until recently. It’s been great to take more control with WordPress!

xlindsaywx: We made a slight adjustment to the background to go with an image to give it a little texture. We may play with it a bit, I’d like to add a gradient at some point, which shouldn’t be too hard. We may flip the background to something lighter and flip the header text from white to black.

RJCreative: The most challenging part (as it should be) is to make sure that we’ve got the message of what we’re doing very clear. We’ve tried not to overload the site with copy, but I agree that it can be hard to get the message to stand out. We’ll continue to work on it.

we’ve actually started to help a client of ours create a new website in WordPress and we’re talking with others. We’re in the overall IT support business, not web site business, we didn’t intend to get into web site development (really helping people manage their own websites), but it may actually become a part of our business.

Thanks!

Good site. I agree that it looks clean and professional.

One issue I noticed, though, is that you’ve got a picture on the home page that gives you a 404 error if you click on it, should be an easy to fix broken link.

I’ve just started to really think about SEO on my own web site and I’ve got a long way to go myself. For your site, it appears that you have some specific keywords “Kerridge” “Rev7” “K8”. You may want to play around with titles of pages that have this to get it higher in google ranking. I’m using Headspace2 on my site to give me more control on those things.

I just created a new website for my business (we really needed refresh). It’s at totalnetworks.com. I’d like any suggestions on things you like or don’t like. Please let me know your thoughts.

Thanks,

Dave

I should probably make note of the theme I used. It’s called Twicet. Pretty nifty theme out of the box, did a bit of tweaking with the colors and moving a few things around, mostly just needed to mess with a few things with the stylesheet. Used a few plugins as well like Testimonials Manager to do the testimonials (rotating testimonial on home page and the overall testimonials on the testimonials page). One page uses wp-Table. Used Subscribe Sidebar for the facebook fan page link.

Please tell me what you think needs work and what you think is working well now.