Tradionaloven.com – How to make your own pizza ovens

I don’t know about you, but I grew up on a small town, where many things are still traditional. I remember my grandparents had a traditional oven outside, and from time to time they gathered all the family and cooked bread on that oven. Home made bread is nothing compared to the industrial one, and my grandma bread was delicious. And she used to make delicious meals for all of us using that oven. Those were good times.

Those memories came to me again when I was asked to review Traditionaloven.com.

Traditionaloven.com is run by Rado Hand. He is an experienced and talented Oven designer and builder with years of experience. He currently resides in Brisbane, located southeast Queensland.

Rado created traditionaloven.com not only to learn how to create, upload and maintain a website, but bring him better and more profitable contracts due to web exposure. Well, he must be doing a great job getting the needed exposure because Google considers his site an authority for the Keywords “Traditional oven” and ranks first for “pizza oven” keywords. I checked gtrends and these are high competing keywords. Traditional Oven as a competition of almost 1 million pages and manages to rank first. I can only assume that he gets loads of organic and targeted traffic from Google. And we all know what that means right? $;)$

All right, we all know now what he does for a living, but what does the site have to offer?

By visiting the site you will notice that the subject of the site is mainly about traditional ovens and pizza cooking. Following the left menu you’ll see he sells CD’s that can help you understand, build similar ovens like the one’s he builds. But more important than that in my opinion, is the amount of tutorials he created for his visitors. Rado covers a wide variety of tutorials from building details to several oven tutorials like “making a wooden door for baking in wood fired ovens”, or a very useful tutorial showing how to keep a small fire in wood ovens for continuous pizza cooking.

As mentioned before, pizza cooking is one of the main subjects of the site, and if you love pizza like I do you will get very hungry looking at those detailed tutorials and articles complemented with interesting pizza pictures.

One aspect that I like in traditionaloven is the amount of images used to show Rado’s work, all taken by him. Cleaver move. J The pictures taken show the passion Rado’s has for his work, and that is noticed on a small text he wrote:

“As much as I love building with bricks and cooking in these ovens (I do also out to cater for people who I built for when they have parties and need me – another good exposure for my business)[…] People can cook efficiently by using heat energy from gentle wood fire absorbed into the firebricks the cooking refractory part is build out of. These ovens are very practical and pleasing in many aspects. One firing and the oven makes pizzas whole night, then when fire dies out you can slow roast, or reload bread baking batches for 5 hours in stable temperature, then after these you can dry fruit or wet fire-wood for

24 hours extra.”

To prove this passion, you can check the site’s blog where Rado frequently writes articles related to his business and where he gives, and I’m quoting “Practical articles, ideas and stories with tips for everyday life”.

There is also a community forum, that had to be switched off because of an 18 month contract in Europe. But Rado is now back home, and he is planning get the forums back.

The site is monetized in 3 different ways, besides the oven sales, Rado uses adsense, kontera and private ad sales. You will not see them placed all around.

Other positive aspect is the SEO optimization of the site. All pages that I have checked have proper tags and description. Maybe we could learn something with him J

Ok now for the bad part. The overall design of the page is ok. It is not the best but is not the worst. As I usually say it is a matter of personal taste. If it is doing great for him them keep it as it is, with no major changes. I would however recommend a few minor changes.

The first one is to make the logo/header clickable. If some one wants to get back to the homepage the first thing it will do is to try and click on the logo/header of the site.

The second one is to reduce the amount of information show to the visitor. There is too much information at the same time. I’ve found myself frequently lost. My recommendation is to limit the amount of articles shown at a given page, or to divide long posts in two or more pages.

Also there are two different advertising pages. One in regular site, other in the blog. One for adwords advertising, and other for private ad selling. Don’t know if it is meant to be like this but I am of the opinion that both information should be in one place only.

If you are into this subject or want a new oven for yourself you will find traditionaloven.com a great place to visit.