I would like some suggestions on how to improve our new San Diego Surf site. We took it over and it gets 60k hits/day . We are getting ideas now and will start implementing them in January. If anyone has some form of advice, I'd love to hear it. Later, Mike
Apart from that mouse-over top left, I like it. Mouse-over and showing info means it's otherwise hidden. Bad practise IMO.
Thanks, it has been like this for a while. I figgured since we took it over we might as well do what we can to pimp it out
oh, and the forum took a long time to load for me. I would also suggest incorporating the forum design with the site design as a whole...
I like the industry ST, I have seen some of the shows that show surfing and play music at the same time on cable TV and they are some great shows. The problem I see with your site is that you are sending users to bigger and better surf sites with the cam links. Why would they come back to your site and not just use the bigger sites?
True, my partners will come back from vacation in January and we will do what we can. It is a very popular site here in SD but limited resources held it back. quote:" When was that taken? 1970? " I forgive you chachi .. this 1 time, getting fresh pics now
Give me a job as a camera man and a good looking pickup truck with your logo on it and I will drive from beach to beach with the truck cam and interview surfers and supermodels for your site. Make that a crew cab so I can take my crew of models with me and we will always have hot content for the site. I can use the young chicks to draw surfers in for interviews
Actually my partners don't want any bikini of the day or whatever. I am trying to create a blog now and do some other stuff. It's coming along. Compromises compromises
I've been there before... Not much of a surfer, but I've checked out the cams and tide reports a while back. Local san diego info would be good too - things like the zoo, wild animal park, sea world. Even just links for more info. That way people can see this as a San Diego portal kind of site. That's just me though, because it always takes me 10 minutes to find the right pages when I'm looking for San Diego info. Also, maps to surfing beaches, reviews of the beaches. I don't know about SD, but in OC, there's some places that are good for beginners, and others where beginners aren't welcome. Then there are still others that are black-balled most of the summer because there's just too many people in the water. There are some big swells pretty far off the coast sometimes that everybody is interested in seeing people surf - you know the 30+ footers. I bet if you put up some pages as to where they are located in general and alerts when they are up + a few shots of surfers actually out there you would get a lot of people just checking those pages out to see the waves. And you never know... if you keep buggin the local media, you might get a plug when they have that annual story about the crazy guy out there trying to win the big wave contest.
Thanks. Right now I am working on the forum which is sooooooooooo slow! It is faster on a different server http://www.loudcart.com/webwiz/ but still not there. I need to ask a real amateur question now: Is it possible to have a subdomain hosting somewhere else than the actual domain name? I was thinking about forums.surfingsandiego.com Everyone in the forums tells me to just scrap it and build a new kick ass forum and I think that is what should be done! Lemme know your input, technical and optinion wise. Mike
absolutely. It's a matter of configuring your DNS record to point to the right address. Some registrars have a dns configuration utility. Your dns is handled by network solutions. You can do a whois search there for your domain, click on Manage DNS, and create a new entry for forums.surfingsandiego.com once you have an IP for your forums. I personally would recommend transferring your domain away from network solutions. They cost a lot, and they have screwed me before when I didn't renew a domain on time. (basically a week of downtime even after I paid the 70 bucks, which is 10 times what it cost me to renew elsewhere). Looks like you are using an ASP based forum. My experience is that php based forums all work better. You can see my thread under site administration on phpBB vs. vBulletin which I think are the two best forums out there.
Thank you, Nev. hehe network Solutions would have been the last of my choices as well My partners are out of town and I don't want to make fast decisions. I love the site and the forum. Don't wanna mess anything up. Eventually we may get a major sponsor but all in all the site is from surfers for surfers, no desire to commercialize, quality first. vBulletin seems to be the best judging by the percentages from all the inputs I have received. Even the guys on the forum said "Don't worry about this forum and all the posts, just trash it and start over". That really says a lot right there Mike
I hear that www.surfcams.mobi are looking for providers and are launching fairly soon so plenty of time to get hooked up
Nice idea, but the header section width is shorter than the rest of the site. Menu item should be visible. Don’t make the blocks gray, or remove the yellow border . Move the title to the right, as it is not clear right now that those are titles Remove those columns and tots and make the font bigger.