Gränby Centrum is a shopping mall located in my hometown Uppsala. They have just released a new updated design/structure of their website. Unfortunately they have not really done the job quite as good as you would hope.
The website is a lot better than the previous one, that was based on Flash and not very intuitive when it came to giving the visitor a worthy experience. Gränby Centrum is a big shopping mall with about 60 stores and 5 restaurants so my guess is that the agency who created the website could charge a good sum of money. Of course I can’t know what the client wanted in this case, but what I do know is that if you are a webdesign agency you optimize a website for search engines. This isn’t the case for Gränby Centrum!
The first thing that came to my attention was the use of weblinks. A good URL structure is very important for the search engine to index the content. Instead of using “/index?pageId=1″ it should be something similar to “/about-this-site”.
Unique titles and inline content headers is another part that is used for the making the life of search engines easier. Every page should have a unique title in the header, and preferably it should be the same as the h1-tag that is used as a header in the inline content. Unfortunately Gränby Centrum doesn’t have any of the titles.
Luckily some SEO has been done for Gränby Centrum someway down the road, because the Serp is quite good overall. I’m not saying I have the perfect solution always, but as a webdesigner i’m not proud when a work has been poorly done. I just think the responsible of Gränby Centrum should do the job that is expected in 2010. =)
