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I have a new customer that is redesigning her website.  The graphic designer has designed a lovely homepage that is mostly an image with some navigation and footer area for text information. My concern is that there isn't any real call to action or anything on the homepage design other than an interesting and fun graphic.  It seems like years ago this was a common practice and then later it was looked down on as not good for the user experience or SEO. What is the latest thinking on this type of design?  Should the homepage (www.mysite.com) be allowed to be mostly images? Or should we focus on the optimizing the internal pages and let the homepage be more creative?

I have a customer who has many domain names and assets but she's wanting to consolidate some of them to help her simplify things for her customers but mostly she wants to build up her website through which she sells products. Grief Reflection - www.griefreflection.com is a personal journal that she's keeping to process the impending death of her husband and it's also linked to her business website which sells healing from grief types of products. Storybooks for Healing - www.storybooksforhealing.com is the website through which she sells workbooks and memory books for people who want to keep the memory of their loved one alive after they've gone. I've setup both of these domains as campaigns and have been looking at the metrics for both.  The grief reflection blog out performs the storybooks for healing website. If we merge the two then the Grief Reflection blog would likely become a subdirectory under www.storybooksforhealing.com and be more fully integrated which she thinks will help her visitors not get confused while navigating her website. www.griefreflection.com has 12,637 links while www.storybooksforhealing.com has 1,462.  Also, Google has indexed 380 pages of Grief Reflection and only 100 pages for Storybooks for Healing, though that may be because there are fewer pages to index. Grief reflection also has a 4.36 mozRank and 5.30 mozTrust, where Storybooks has 4.13 mozRank and 5.15 mozTrust. Should I counsel her to keep these domains separate?  If not, would simply setting up 301 redirects from the www.griefreflection.com domain name to the new subdirectory under www.storybooksforhealing.com be the way to go? Thank you ever so much for any wisdom anyone can provide.

Good news!  I have my first real SEO gig and now I have to be able to actually deliver. I'm up for it but I want to be sure I'm seeing what I think I am before suggesting any changes.  I'm working my way throught Danny Dover's excellent book SEO Secrets and learning tons! To see if there is duplicate content on the site, I've taken a sentence from one of the pages on the site and searched for it:  i.e., site:storybooksforhealing.com "Some of the most quiet moments are often the most difficult after a loss. Mornings, late nights, time alone." The SERPs show 7 pages that have this text on it.  It seems like this is duplicate content, right? This is a Wordpress website so what's happening is the actual page is here: www.storybooksforhealing.com/publish-cup-of-joy/ but there are several archive pages that show excerpts of this text, too. If this is duplicate content (first question) then how would I go about remedying it? Should I set the canonical reference to /publish-cup-of-joy page? Thank you for being patient with my NOOB questions.