markhodson
Forum Replies Created
-
Forum: Plugins
In reply to: [W3 Total Cache] How to remove " ?repeat=w3tc " from query stringthis has been wrongly marked as “resolved”
Forum: Your WordPress
In reply to: Quintana Roo Travel – Mexican CaribbeanHi,
I run a group of travel websites with 4 million visitors a year. I also help travel companies with their web marketing.
The first thing I would say is: “Who are you?!”
If you are going to create an authoritative resource about the Yucatan (or anywhere), you either need to create the most comprehensive guide on the web (think Wikipedia size and scope) or you are going to promote your site based on who you are. Are you an expert? Do you live in the region?
Even if you don’t actually live in the Yucatan, your site will only come alive when you engage with your visitors on a personal level. You need to say: “This is who I am, this is my world view.” Then people can either buy into that or not. By staying anonymous (and not even having an “about” page is pushing it to the limits of anonymity), you will not achieve any level of engagement.
I would like to see something “about you” on the homepage, perhaps with your photo in the masthead. I want to know what you think about these places, and to hear your personal recommendations. Perhaps you can persuade your visitors to leave their own recommendations, but you’ll find that easier if you have a voice yourself on the site.
The success of my own sites has been built on promoting the editors and their personal expertise, emphasising the fact that theirs are individual recommendations. I think you can borrow that idea.
In terms of design, the site is too generic. It looks plain vanilla, clean and unthreatening but without character. Make it more cluttered, remove the background photo and get some pictures of people (Mexico is a populous country but anyone looking at your site would think it had been hit by a neutron bomb!)
Good luck
Mark Hodson,
[sig moderated as per the Forum Rules]Forum: Your WordPress
In reply to: Perfecting our travel siteHi Chris, thanks for taking the time. We’ll talk through your ideas.
Mark
Forum: Your WordPress
In reply to: Contribution-Driven British SiteA couple of thoughts:
I like the clean design but I don’t think the typefaces work. The headline font is too heavy and old-fashioned. The body type is a bit staid. I would avoid italics in the header navigation bar. I don’t like the hover-over yellow.
The purple flashes behind links are too dark. They obscure the text behind them.
Change the URL settings so URLs are created from the titles of posts. Go to Settings > Permalinks, tick “Custom Structure” and besite it enter the following:
/%category%/%postname%hope that helps.
[link removed]
Forum: Your WordPress
In reply to: Taking this website to the next levelA couple of thoughts:
The red background doesn’t work for me. It’s too rich a colour, both distracting and somehow inappropriate in my view. What’s wrong with white?
The donate button should be a contrasting colour.
You should probably invest in a logo. The typeface of your site name looks a bit dated. If you have a clear idea of what you want, you could try to get a designer on fiverr.com to make one. Otherwise try to find a designer who will create an original logo, perhaps on a pro bono basis, or in exchange for a link from your site. You could try to find one Twitter?
Centred text looks amateurish. Set it left.
Watch your spelling. eg http://www.rfahaiti.org/2011/12/new-house/ (it’s successful).
On the above page, use the images bigger and move at least one of them to the top of the page so readers are not just looking at a slab of text.
Hope this is useful. If you want to critique back, this is my WordPress site: [link moderated – if you want to show your site off, please start your own topic in ‘Your WordPress’]
Forum: Your WordPress
In reply to: tit for tat?It’s a very striking theme, and certainly catches the eye. My only concern is that it might not appeal to your target userbase who – I assume – are above average age. Or maybe not?
In terms of content, I suggest that you don’t begin each post with the same headline “Healthy aging: xxxx”. Both your users and the search engines are aware of the site’s subject matter and it just looks a bit spammy to keep repeating it.
You should also look at your page titles: it’s better to have the unique element at the beginning and the name of the blog (just once) at the end.
Forum: Your WordPress
In reply to: Looking for feedback on my travelsiteyes, it looks nice, an elegant theme, if a little tame.
I am a bit confused, though, by the “blog” link in the header navigation. The whole site looks like a blog. The “blog” link takes me to older blog posts (?). You may need to do some work on your tagging and categories.
You might want to consider a static homepage to highlight what the site is all about with links to most popular pages, plus a video, images, etc, perhaps relegating the blog posts to a box down the page.
Even if you don’t do that, I would put the “about us” panel above “follow us”. It’s more interesting and I don’t think people will sign up to follow you until they know who you are.
From a SEO point of view, I would upload the Headspace 2 plugin so you can control page titles. Put something more keyword-rich at the beginning of each page title.
Mark Hodson, 101 Honeymoons