Wanted: Website Review sortcode site

purg · Jul 13, 2009

Halfway through the design of another sortcode mini but come up against IE issue. The site looks fine in firefox and IE 6 but breaks in IE8.. if anyone could assist.

anyway... review please of the site so far but feedback regarding google adsense link placement would be very handy.

its basically a 2 page site using dynamic URLs to look more like 500 pages (page per bank form the top500 link).

s o r t c o d e s {dot} c o m

Have another half finished site im sure you would have seen the template before lol
s o r t c o d e {dot} o r g

accelerator · Jul 14, 2009

My views:

Search box needs to be higher up home page (near top).

Use highlight colour to highlight search box.

AdSense needs to appear within the body of the page to get clicks.

Wouldn't people want to look up the name of the branch to get a sort code bank rather than the way round you have??

Hope that helps.

Rgds

purg · Jul 14, 2009

branch? As in First Direct being HSBC...
Good idea but backend only has clearing house names and addresses. Something I will look into adding for future updates.

Thanks for your feedback
I'll play with swapping search box location and colour.

Will also toy with a side banner to facilitate another adsense location. Changing the body script would affect many other sites I have in this field. Might be too much effort for the money.

accelerator · Jul 14, 2009

My view on AdSense is that you have to stick it right under people's noses / right where they are looking in order to get decent click rates. As an example of my preferred placement, my mobile broadband laptops site has AdSense right in the body text, within the first page view, and is also colour coded so as to match the background and not stand out. That's my preferred way, I haven't looked at heatmaps in detail, but I reckon the periphery of the page, i.e. header, side columns, are effectively invisible to most users. They now have banner blindness and never look there, do you?

Rgds

purg · Jul 15, 2009

On the other domain - sort code /{dot} org
Taken your advise and placed adsense smack in the middle of the page. Understand I got stuck on design and layout when its clicks on links that count.

Later i'll update the sql script to also output the adsense block after x rows.

The site isnt index (sig link only went up last night) so hopefully have some adsense data to compare soon.

Thanks for the feedback.

accelerator · Jul 15, 2009

Yes, on the home page AdSense placement much better.

Personally, I'd probably return AdSense straight after the first database result.

FYI A-Z list on banks link at bottom right isn't working.

Just to clarify, are you saying a sort code lookup by address isn't possible. E.g. let's say I wanted to find NatWest bank in Southampton's sort code, I can't search on NatWest Southampton??

Rgds