Page Review

We are in the process of doing a redesign. We have come up with the following page (there are other similar but this is a good example) and would like some feedback. Please note that meta-tags are going to be finished until afterwards, so ignore those for now.

Just wanted to get a general survey about a few issues.


Page URL:
http://www.rackaid.com/cobalt/raq4/webmail.cfm


Top Navigation:
Would the graphics based top navigation structure be better as a text for SEO reasons?

Crumbtrail:
We like the crumb trail because it allows us easy navigation without having to create a large menu structure.
Any SEO effects? This should concentrate PR at the top of the site?

Bottom Navigation:
From our stats, no one ever uses this? So should we get rid of it as it dilutes PR from content pages to these high level pages that get good PR from the crumb trail? (Have to ask the designer why the heck TOS and Terms of Service are both listed. lol).

Site Map
Lastly, our home page is PR5 with many 4's below it. We suspect we may be going to a 6 next dance (maybe this one) as we are picking up a lot of backlinks (about 200) from a site that is a PR4 that has good anchor word linking back to our site. Would a site map linked off the home page help search engines find these deeper pages and spread the PR deeper.

We are early in the redesign phase and wanted to do it this time around with SEO in mind.

My concern is that our current design tends to concentrate PR into higher level pages. These higher level pages tend to contain less targeted content, so their serps for specific terms may be lower than the product pages.

Thanks....

Tested in Mozilla 800x600 56k modem. Loads really fast even on my slow modem. Roolovers work fine in Mozilla. Nice clean design with a concise description of what the site is about and clear navigation. Overall, a good design. Good luck with it.

Nick

Thanks Nick.... we have streamlined even further. Most of our visitors are looking for support services and often in a hurry as their server is not working properly or they have a client bugging them about so-and-so perl module. We want people to be able to find info quickly with the hope that this leads to more sales....

We've ditched the tab graphics for a simple text based nav bar .... as needed more room for categories and want to keep the sites nav. very shallow.

http://www.rackaid.com/cobalt/raq3/


The awstats link is the only one that works right now as the next level down....

and not that is not me with the servers ;)

Also, I was wondering what word other than "Resources" would convey the fact that this section has news links, tutorials, and tips.