Blog News

Hi Guys,

Just wanting some feedback on my new website/blog, powered by wordpress.

The design is based of a premium theme I purchased, however I have made a lot of changes to suit the requirements of the site.
The idea of the site is simple, it allows for people to promote and discover blogs/articles relating to blogging, SEO and IM (tips, tutorials etc.). Users have the ability to find articles relating to these subjects and bloggers have the ability to submit there own article (a permalink back to their original blog/article, it is not reposted on design news).

Blog News

Let me know what you think.
Feel free to submit links back to your own articles if they relate to the above mentioned topics (it is moderated).
Once things start to pick up a bit I do have some advertising plans to help bring traffic to the site and help promote everyone submissions.

 

This is a good site. Layout - you may want to change it a bit and make it more interactive. Let visitors know the benefits of submission, etc. The About Us section at the bottom isn't really what strikes first.

 

Thanks Dynavox.
I will be changing a few things around, at the moment I am testing the current level of submissions and CTR on those articles from the home page with the current layout. After about a month I will change things around based on this months stats.

 

I liked the theme.
I am kind of wondering about the content as a whole. Is it just going to be just links?

 

Jorge,
The site is essentially going to be built up as a central hub for people (and people just starting with blogging) looking for articles about blogging, seo and IM. For the most part it will consist of links (as you can see currently on the home page) to the articles that have been submitted.
Once it is a bit large there are a few changes that will be made, but otherwise it will remain quite similar to it's current format, a means for people to find articles/blogs about the subject or for bloggers to promote their own.

 

I have expected it to be news website. but its just some articles about SEO. I don't find layout is much attractive. Footer area is very big and main part of website is in white color and adsense is so visible at first sight.

 

no news at all on a news site.. but i liked the theme

 

Thank you for the replies.
The point of the site is to promote articles relating to Blogging, SEO and IM which is why there are links to articles, people can add links to their own articles.

 

I tried submitting one article, the process is very quick and doesn't require much time.
But as a visitor, I was wondering what could make me come back to read the new submissions.
What do you propose?

 

Thanks for the review James. (Approved your link by the way).

In regards to user retention, many people like to visit one single hub to find articles, blogs, videos etc regarding the topic they enjoy because it is easier, so in theory once Blog News picks up a lot more there should be quite a large returning user base.
On top of that, I recently opened the forums: http://forums.blog-newz.com, which is obviously another reason for people interested in Blogging, SEO and IM to return. I am working on further integration between the forum and the main blog/showcase to improve this.

 

ok, note that in the submit form when in the tags field, there is no mention of tags having to be separated by a comma. For instance on youtube and many other places now they take each word as one tag, so not many people are used to having to write comma (I do when it is specified, if nothing is specified I assume space is the delimiter)
For multiple words tags when separated by space the convention is to use " around the tag phrase.

 

Thanks for the Feedback James.
I hadn't though of that, just added it to the form.

 

Wow it's a blog directory....
please add a category widget ,so it helps to user to find something fastly

 

If you have coding skills, I suggest you add a way for you to select some of the most interesting submissions and easily create a forum thread (with the brief description submitted) from your admin area.
That way, the main site submissions will feed the discussions in the forum where members can discuss the articles points.

You could do it by hand at first, but it will get old/boring quickly, so if you can code something in your admin area, it would be time well invested.

 

Interesting theme.. I think some small picture/icon will make your page more interesting

 

Btemplates: Thanks, I am already currently working on a feature like that.

James: Thanks for the idea, I might take a look at doing something like that. Might be a good idea seeing as the main idea of the site is to help build traffic to the user submitted links.

Kerdip: Thanks, might add something like that in the future.

 

good stuff keep it up. Found a few blogs through your site.

 

the theme is just to whitish for me really..
Kind of putts me off

 

Thanks Salyn.

Jaggudada: Thanks for the feedback, I might look at adding a gradient to the article boxes to add a bit more variety to the color.

 

it looks good to me!