Hello, everyone! I purchased a blog off of another DigitalPoint member several weeks ago and I'm in the process of cleaning it up and revamping it. I've added a bit of fresh content (and have a lot more posts scheduled every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday). I created some social media accounts for the site, as well. I installed a new design, purchased a logo, setup an e-mail list, and did a bunch of SEO work. I even have some people who are going to start commenting to stir some activity. I was hoping that some of you would take a few minutes to visit my site and let me know your overall thoughts. What do you think of the blog? How's the speed? Do you have any suggestions or recommendations on how to make the site better? Would you follow this blog? I'm really excited to hear what you think. P.S. Ignore the empty space on the sidebar and near the footer - that will be for AdSense. The blog is located here: Thank you so much for your time!
Your site looks good. The loading time of the font is long. I think it's because my net connection is slow. The thumbnails are perfectly aligned. The only problem with your blog is responsive design. The Google Ad on the page bottom does not shrink according to the page width. It's better to add a square ad for approval of Google Adsense, because it won't mess with the responsive design of your blog. Consider changing the DNS records. If you are using CNAME, use A record instead, because it's faster. Your page loads faster than 87% of tested websites - says http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/clWK6L/http://www.webmastersmag.com/ You're blog have a good performance grade too. I would recommend you to add pagination like mine (http://subinsb.com) instead of the Next/Previous links. Overall your site is good.
Hi I like the site idea. MMO niche is always popular because people always want to know how to make money online. I found the site loaded as fast as most sites did. But there wasn't much on the homepage to slow it down which is good. The one thing that striked me is how much this looks like any other MMO WordPress blog out there but we all got to start somewhere. At the end of the day its content that matters and if you can keep this same rate up then you have only to get more successful. You said you set up an email list but I see no where to subscribe to your sites feed or regular updates. Perhaps you could burn your feed with FeedBurner (using the Google account you created for this site) and offer FeedBurner email subscriptions. Or you could use another email subscription service like AWeber but its not free. But I wish you the best of luck with it in the future. Regards.
Nice, clean, modern design...a nice online atmosphere. I was wondering about lack of navs and/or indexing. I didn't go through but a few pages and didn't know how long that would go on...no indication of # of ___ or something like that. What about breaking posts up into categories? That's really my only critique...I liked the design, color & style alot. Hope buying that site turns out to be a good thing for you.
Thank you for the comments! I appreciate you taking the time to review my website - your feedback is very helpful. I will investigate your point regarding the advertisement affecting the responsive design as well as the CNAME vs A record suggestion. Pagination is an excellent suggestion as well... I will implement that right away as I had not even noticed that my website lacked numbered pages. Thanks again for your thoughts! Thank you for the review and the suggestions! I am glad to hear that the site loaded fast and that you liked the content. I recently hired some writers to start producing content 3 times a week for the blog and I hope that visitors will find it to be useful. I agree that the site doesn't look very unique; I will have to look into making some changes to give the blog its own personality. If you scroll to the bottom of each post you should see a box to subscribe to my mailing list - but I will have to add the option elsewhere, as well, so that it has a higher level of visibility. Thanks for pointing that out. The feed, and the mailing list, are both through FeedBurner at this time, but I'll be switching over to something else this weekend. Great feedback, thanks! Thank you for the kind words, Vagz! I will definitely change the site's pagination. Could you elaborate on what you mean by 'breaking posts up into categories?'
I was referring to categories like "Social Media", "SEO", "Affiliates" - creating an index of categories for the browser to refer to instead of having to keep scrolling thru pages to find something of interest
Do you think the categories box on the sidebar isn't enough? Should I add a secondary navbar as well?
Sorry, I didn't see that...I'm so used to ads occupying that space that I barely even looked. Personally, I think it makes more sense to create a nav bar of categories if they don't number so many as to crowd the bar.
As per your recommendation, I have updated the blog's pagination style! Let me know what you think! To make the categories more visible, I rearranged my sidebar. Does it look any better now? I am exploring some ideas with a secondary navigation bar as well. I will soon be updating to a new e-mail subscription service but, in the meantime, I added a 'subscribe' box (from FeedBurner) to the sidebar to enhance visibility. What do you think? Thanks again for all of your thoughts and suggestions, everyone!
Hey Phil, Hope you are doing great. Ok, so about the blog. Your blog looks really Very Elligent, very clear, easy to read everything. But, i would recommend 2 things here. First, there is no menu bar on top, Blog or website must have menu bars etc. If you don't want to create pages then, use the custom menu and put the categories in menu bar. Categories that you put in sidebar is too downsides. It suppose to be visible.... 2nd things, there is no need for search bar right now. you can remove that and can use any other widgets or you can use categories there. So, this is it. Nothing must. Everything is great. Awesome Blog. Thanks, Rahul
Hey PhiladelphiaIM, The load time is good and I like the design but I also have some tips/questions: - The ads placement is quite bad. The one in the sidebar should be a bit higher and the one on the bottom won't get a lot of clicks (one of the worst places for a good CTR). To get a good CTR you should add one inside your article, there are even WP plugins to do this for Adsense. - I see that all the links on your website are dofollow. Currently it's no problem but just make sure you don't get to many of them on certain pages to avoid SERP penalties. - Why you don't add the article image that you have on the frontpage in your articles? Should be a bit better for SEO. Good luck with your website, I hope my review helped a bit . Regards, Quiz
Looks good. I like clean looking stuff. I would submit that your excerpt length is too low. Its not ideal for SEO. Aside from that I quite like it. Nigel