Architect Foster + Partners' website, fosterandpartners.com, scores well on usability but badly needssome search engine optimisation

Webmaster鈥檚 verdict

In terms of usability, fosterandpartners.com is great. A clean layout, clearly labelled navigation and a good choice of colours follows all the right website building practices. The only place that the site designers have placed aesthetics above functionality is with the text-scrolling tool, which hinders quick scanning of text. It looks cute, but is it necessary?

This site is in need of some heavy search engine optimisation. The main problem is that every single page has the same name, which doesn't look good in Google search results. Simply changing the page titles to reflect the content (by mirroring story headlines, for example) would benefit the site immensely.

Vital statistics

134,198th

Most popular site on the internet globally, as ranked by web information company Alexa

Google ranking 6/10

This ranking indicates how important it is to other sites that link to it

Inbound links: Yahoo 20,526

This shows how many pages Yahoo says link to the site

Indexed pages: Google 987, Yahoo 873

This shows how many pages on the site have been recorded by Google and Yahoo.

Postscript

Greg Morris is an online supervisor at www.building.co.uk

Topics