Please review my Podcast website !

Discussion in 'Websites' started by ParisByPod, Jan 2, 2008.

  1. #1
    Hi there,

    Could some of you review my Podcast website and tell me what's not working / broken / not easily understandable / if it takes too much time to load...
    If a Mac user could test the horizontal menu, I would be relieved to know that it works fine under a Safari :D

    I already spent too much time on it, I may miss quite obvious things... Don't hesitate to criticize, I'm willing to improve my website before I officially launch it to the world at the end of January :)

    Here it is : www.ParisByPod.com

    By the way, let me know if any of you are intersted by learning French language !

    Thanks !
     
    ParisByPod, Jan 2, 2008 IP
  2. ParisByPod

    ParisByPod Peon

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    #2
    Hi there,
    anyone to review my website and comment ?
    Thanks a lot !
     
    ParisByPod, Jan 4, 2008 IP
  3. esauldaris

    esauldaris Peon

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    #3
    its to slow.
     
    esauldaris, Jan 4, 2008 IP
  4. mathias

    mathias Active Member

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    #4
    it looks great but it loads way too slow! Took me 30 seconds before I could see the site... And I do have a fast internet connection so that's not the problem!
     
    mathias, Jan 4, 2008 IP
  5. swedal

    swedal Notable Member

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    #5
    I don't like popups and it has a very spammy feel to it
     
    swedal, Jan 4, 2008 IP
  6. jayasimha

    jayasimha Peon

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    #6
    Hi Yannick,

    I am not sure if I can post here. I am new. This is a test.
     
    jayasimha, Jan 4, 2008 IP
  7. jayasimha

    jayasimha Peon

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    #7
    Hi Yannick,

    I am very impressed by your site. I will learn French now !

    I lived in The Netherlands for 12 years and I speak, read and write Dutch fluently. Unfortunately I did not get time to learn French. As an exchange student in Canada I even had a room mate from Paris but again never had free time to learn French !

    I was actually toying with the idea of a similar site for Indian langauges ! We speak many langauges with different scripts. A site similar to yours can be of great help !

    cheers,
    jay
     
    jayasimha, Jan 4, 2008 IP
  8. Thibaut

    Thibaut Well-Known Member

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    #8
    Nice one, you should maybe optimize your Adsense, coz they don't fit very well.
    I must add, you should review your SEO as well :)

    +
    Thibaut
     
    Thibaut, Jan 6, 2008 IP
  9. ParisByPod

    ParisByPod Peon

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    #9
    Hi there,

    Thanks a lot for your comments guys !
    Being too much into the website technical & content building, I obviously missed the most important :mad:


    1. esauldaris, mathias, swedal
    You were completely right about the site being slow.

    I spent quite a few hours identifying the problem & managed to find a solution - at least to some extent.
    I'll explain in a few words here, and maybe create a dedicated post in the correct forum, for knowledge sharing purposes. I hope this can be helpful to some readers !

    PROBLEM : Worpdpress site being much to slow
    • I'm using Wordpress as my blog system.
    • Gradually, I added quite a few plug-ins : rating, emailing, PodPress, cforms, Socail Bookmarks, nextGen Gallery, and so on...
    • Each of them having his own CSS + Javascript, it ended up with 17 external files being called on each page (code located in the HEAD tags).
    • Even if those files were small, I guess it's the high number of files - 17 - that delayed so much the page loading.

    SOLUTION
    The solution I came up so far was to get rid of those 17 external files, and call the necessary ones only when needed. I insist on the "only when needed" part !

    For instance, on my homepage I don't need to call plugin-in such as SocialBookmarks/ NextGen Gallery / PodPress. So I no longer activate them here, and finally I managed to drop from 17 to only 3 external files being called. With a visible result on loading time.

    NEXT STEPS
    • optimizing the images
    • fine-tuning Wordpress, there's still room for improvement


    2. swedal
    Agreed, the popup was too "spammy", I'll get back to a simpler one, without the images. Or maybe lighter ones... Currently I completely disactivated the popup.


    3. jayasimha
    Thanks for the comment, glad to hear you like the website.
    I have no idea about hte indian marklet, so I can't help very much...

    4. Thibaut
    You're right, I should definitively optimize for Search Engines, so far I couldn't find time to do it... I'm still into building the website ;)
    Probably I'll go through optimized "landing pages", since optimizing current pages /posts might be difficult (using both French & English language in the posts, it's clear that I can't optimize very well...)

    As for the GoogleAdSense, you are right again.
    I don't know if the ads rely only on the content of the page they are located on (in my case, English & French mixed, so they are often not relevant...), or if there is a way to tell Goggle that only ads relevant to Franch language & Paris should be displayed.


    Thanks all of you again for your remarks.

    Yannick
     
    ParisByPod, Jan 6, 2008 IP