Evaluate my first site

Submitted by tidhar on Wed, 07/16/2008 - 08:13.

Hey

I've started a site a week ago. It's my first site, I've never built a site before. I also knew it will be a PPC failiure (which indeed it was :) )

Main reason is that I knew there will probablly not be much demand for the products I'm promoting (World of Warcraft Guides), since most of the products for sale are either already baught by now, or being illigaly downloaded.

So my "comperison" site worked perfectlly in the sence of people were going threw it, reading everything, but no one clikced even a single affiliate link, but went back to their dowloading programs instead (well, at least that's what i think they did).

Why did I bother then?

Well, the site is about a subject that i like, and i knew it's small enouph to not make me broke even if failed (in total i spent about 100$ on PPC promotion) so I pretended I'm investing the money in an affiliate course. And i learnt a LOT!

It's true what they say that the best way to learn is by "jumping into to water", and learning from mistakes, and that's what I did.

I'm basically pausing my PPC campaign for now, I will totally revamp my site now, and take it down a more "bloggy" path and promote it in more organic ways.

Part of the Learning experience is getting as many critiques about my site from people as I can, so I would very much appriciate if people could look into it, and tell me what their thoughts are! ESPECIALLY if you're a Warcraft Freak like I am :)

Also, any tips on how i can organically promote a site in this area (Online- Games, role playing games, etc) will be very welcomed!

Main page:
http://www.wow-guides-now.com/

Landing pages variation 1: (single product landing pages)

http://www.wow-guides-now.com/top-choice-leveling-guide
http://www.wow-guides-now.com/top-gold-making-guide-offer
http://www.wow-guides-now.com/over-all-package-offer

Landing pages variation 2: (Products comparisons landing pages)

http://www.wow-guides-now.com/compare-leveling
http://www.wow-guides-now.com/compare-gold

I even started a Blog (which will become the main part of the site after I re-vamp it)

http://www.wow-guides-now.com/wgn-leveling-frenzy-project

It will take about a week to revamp the whole site, and I would appriciate any comments you good people might have to give me :)

Thanks a lot!

Tidhar.

Hi Tidhar, I'd say this is a

Submitted by mmuise on Wed, 07/16/2008 - 13:53.

Hi Tidhar,

I'd say this is a pretty good try for a first site!

One suggestion I would make, based on a cursory look, is to take out the left menu on the landing pages. You want to focus your visitors on ONE conversion goal, which in your case is to click on an affiliate link.

I'm sure others will chime in with additional suggestions.

Moe

Hey Moe First, thanks for

Submitted by tidhar on Wed, 07/16/2008 - 15:17.

Hey Moe

First, thanks for the encouragments and for the tip :)

I will try "vanishing" that left menu on the next "generation" of the site. I will probablly just switch all the navigation of the site to the "More on wow- guides- now" menu on the bottom, like I did on the main page. Does that sound like a good Idea?

Tidhar

Changing site to "under Construction" status

Submitted by tidhar on Thu, 07/17/2008 - 07:28.

I'm changing the iite for "under construction" status until I sort out all my changes

Thanks to anyone who viewed it

"This site is down for

Submitted by kensav on Thu, 07/17/2008 - 22:04.

"This site is down for maintenance. Please check back again soon. "

got twitter?
www.twitter.com/kensavage

Page Size - Wow!

Submitted by woodsja on Fri, 07/18/2008 - 16:58.

Tidhar,
The site is not bad and you have some real useful content, but the first thing I noticed was how long it took to load the site. As you may already know, Google is penalizing quality score for slow rendering pages. I took a moment to see how big your home page is and was astonished. The total document size, which includes HTML, images, scripts, and CSS was 332Kb! I know we all have broadband internet, but you still need to be concerned with your site's performance.

HTML: 18Kb
Images: 216Kb
Scripts: 74Kb
CSS: 24Kb

The first thing I would do is try to optimize those images and see if you can get the total document size to under 100Kb. Keep up the good work and best of luck.

Cheers,

Jason Woods
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