Hello to all. Please review my site.

Hello To all. I've been working on this website for quite some time and would like some honest and brutal reviews.

Here is the site.
http://ebookswewrote.com

Thank you.

 

Nice idea. Nice clean layout. Easy to use, love the lack of popups, ads, prompts, slideovers and all the other crap that most freebie sits inflict on their readers.

Some oddities:

Why two images in the header, mirrored? One would be enough and less weird.
Possibly the worst use of a pointless slider ever in the top left (and really messy, too).
Horrible capitalisation in excerpts, which would also be better as summaries of the books (as opposed to promo text or TOC).
Nav bar looks like you forgot to take off some text.
Contact form is really ugly and looks weird (suggest using Contact Form 7 instead).

The main thing for me is that it's very hard to read all that promo text about books - there's just so much "!" in it all. A short, unique and original summary para for each item (as the excerpt before the "more" tag) would really make you stand out, IMHO, and probably do some good for your SEO.

 

Hello and thank you for your reply.

I personally dislike all the pop-ups and sliders... So I opted to NOT have any.

I'll work on making the CAPS being not so much.

Header image - no idea- researching to find out how that happens. I thought it was only one.

lol I hate when that happens - Forgotten page on the header. Thats my "TEST" page.

Thank you for the great feedback. I'll keep on working on it.

 

Don't screw yourself out of income completely, though: one or two static ads is fine.

Copy text. Open Word. Paste text. CTRL-A. Shift-F3 a couple of times. Copy. Paste back into site.

I mean the people at either end. One group is fine, but it kinda freaked me out when I realised the second group of people was the same as the first, mirrored. Evil Twin syndrome.

 

"Don't screw yourself out of income completely, though: one or two static ads is fine. "
Thats why the "cool stuff" is there. I've seen a corner ad that I may place. not sure yet.

There is no way to change the excerpt size. No option given for it. So I made the slider come up on top.

I change the header image.

Working on the !!!! and CAPS

 

It's WordPress: you can change anything. You can drop a "more" marker into the text, which defines the end of the excerpt, or you can use a plugin to do it (e.g. wordpress.org/plugins/auto-more-tag), or you can edit the theme, or... there are loads of ways.

I have a personal dislike for sliders: I believe they are pointless, useless bandwidth-hogging space-wasters that are overused and implemented for all the wrong reasons. And they make my eyes go squiffy with all that sliding. In this particular case, I can see the sense in having one - you have a reasonably large inventory and the slider allows you to show more on the front page without crowding: pretty much what sliders were invented for.

But I still don't like sliders in general. ;D

 

"It's WordPress: you can change anything. "

Can you tell me how to get WP to do this format
table width/100% - tr
td width=45%
title (smaller)
graphic
excert
"read more"
"repost" - "favorite"
/td
td width=10%
/td
td width=45%
title (smaller)
graphic
excert
"read more"
"repost" - "favorite"
/td
/tr
/table

Display 6 posts at random
i have searched for a way to do this and remove the slider. no luck

dont like the slider much really myself

 

p.s. i tried the auto-more-tag fixed one problem. lol created another.

 

found a code that will do it. It has to be modified to do the table above.

<?php
/*
Plugin Name: Powie's Random Post shortcode
Plugin URI: http://www.powie.de/wordpress
Description: Shortcode <code>[random-post]</code> for displaying a random post, or use the Widget
Version: 1.0.1
License: GPLv2
Author: Thomas Ehrhardt
Author URI: http://www.powie.de
*/

//call widgets file
include('random-post-widget.php');

//Shortcode
add_shortcode('random-post', 'random_post_shortcode');
function random_post_shortcode( $atts ) {
    //var_Dump($atts);
    /*
    extract( shortcode_atts( array(
        'foo' => 'something',
        'bar' => 'something else',
    ), $atts ) );
    return "Hallo -> foo = {$foo}";
    */
    $args = array(
    'numberposts'     => 1,
    'orderby'         => 'rand',
    'post_type'       => 'post',
    'post_status'     => 'publish');
    $post = get_posts($args);
    foreach ($post as $p) {
        $title = apply_filters('the_title', $p->post_title);
        $content =  apply_filters('the_content', $p->post_content);
    }
    return '<h2>'.$title.'</h2>'.$content;
}

//Hook for Activation
register_activation_hook( __FILE__, 'rp_activate' );
//Hook for Deactivation
register_deactivation_hook( __FILE__, 'rp_deactivate' );
//Activate
function rp_activate() {
    // do not generate any output here
    //add_option('postfield-rows',5);
}
//Deactivate
function rp_deactivate() {
    // do not generate any output here
}
?>

Code (markup):

 

WP has a random option built in to the standard posts query, get_posts: http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Tags/get_posts#Random_posts

Of course, a lot of the "anything" you can do with WP requires building your own templates, themes or plugins.

The slider will be in the front page template, whether it's index.php or front-page.php or something else in the theme. You just have to find the code and comment it out, though it's a messy solution - coding prigs would tell you to make a child theme, yada yada yada.