Website review please

**alexwastell** · 10-12-04

Hi guys, a few of you may have remembered my last site, thefinanceguy, it was a bit of a failure so I decided to have along think and talk to a few helpful people, and I wanted to share my site with you just to get some feedback as I go. The design itself is finished, what i'm working on now is the information centre, adding as much infor as possible to that, and a photo gallery. Perhaps a forum but im not too sure whether its the right site for one

Was also thinking of a kind of guestbook where visitors left tales of their experiences in Hong Kong (i thought of it before I saw it on the Hong Kong Travel Board site

) but what I might do is just post a questionairre for the visitors to fill in and let them decide what's next.

Trying really hard here, so all comments would be appreciated, especially from an affiliate (money making) point of view. I have yet to put keywords in, I havent forgotten, by the way. The information area is going to be filled with all sorts of useful stuff, but just wanted an affililate point of view.

Sorry to go on, take a look and let me know what you think.

http://www.visitinghongkong.co.uk

Thanks guys

**drivetowin** · 10-12-04

Site looks good - have you thought about adding Singapore Airlines as well (they're on AF)

**alexwastell** · 10-12-04

thanks kbudden, I was looking into more merchants, i'll check singapore airlines out

Would you say the adverts are about right? could i get away with more, or are there too many?

**drivetowin** · 10-12-04

Personally I would say they are about right - certainly dont add any more per page then you have got now

**alexwastell** · 10-12-04

Thanks - anyone else have anything to add?

**morleymouse** · 10-12-04

Dont add anymore 'ads' but you can get away with more "ads" if you know what I mean.

I see, you dont... well let me explain.

Dont put any more banners, buttons etc round the edge, but write ad copy, like sales text with links in. Like them useful numbers - pad that out with some text at the top about what there for, whatever blah blah and then at bottom wrtie a bit of copy to sell phone cards, im sure some merchants have them. ive seen it posted on here - hence its true.

g'luck!

**Millions** · 10-12-04

Activate a link back to your home page. You seem to have a link to all the other pages but you can not return to the home page unless you click the top banner.
A novice user always returns to the home page to make sure he has not missed any thing.

Weekend is here Yesssssssssssssssssssssss

**stevey** · 10-12-04

Site looks good.

Just a little note:

"We aim to be a complete resource for any traveller in the UK thinking of visting the fantastic Hong Kong." on your front page would be better worded something like:

"Welcome to your complete resource for any traveller in the UK thinking of visting the fantastic Hong Kong."

Make yourself look big rather than small and start adding content and then more content to keep your visitors coming back.

**alexwastell** · 10-12-04

Thanks, some great advice here

Can anyone offer some bried SEO analysis? I've got the keywords in there now, some H1 text, page names such as hong-kong-flights.html, but would you suggest anything else? Is it a case now of steadily adding to the content, and watching the hits roll in?

On that note, I created a forum, 1.Is this a good idea, i mean I want to attract traffic and offer people information, but as an affiliate I want to make money, not provide a lovely forum for people for free. What are your thoughts on this? I have modified phpbb to put a google ad banner after the first post in every topic, so not too intrusive. And do I need to just wait for the forums to pick up (if they do) or do you have any tips? Also, where would I go to find people to exchange links with? (for an SEO point of view)

Sorry theres a lot of questions jammed into that lot, heh.

Enjoy your weekends everyone

mine's starting in a couple of hours

**lowndsy** · 10-12-04

I agree, this is a much better looking site, and uses a safer business model, but your last subject has mor emoney earning potential imo - I hope you do another finance one in the future.

Have a look at the ad bar on the right - it doesn't seem to be wrapping correctly on my screen - I assume the ads were meant to be under each other? (be better if they were any way) In fact the entire page doesn't wrap at all. I suggest you have a look at using percentages for table widths - you aren't suing outrageous sizes or anything but the default computer installation still uses 800*600 which would probably clip the end off your page.

Well done though - hope you earn some serious beer money!

PS I'm using 1024*768 and IE

**alexwastell** · 10-12-04

thanks for that heads up lowndsy, I'm using firefox. They dont wrap in IE, you're right, I did have soft returns in there originally but I wanted to get rid of the space between the ads, so I took them out without checking it in IE. I'll get on that. Rest of the site looks ok in IE though, i'll have a proper look. About the finance site, I would like to do one but i think it would need some serious PPC support to get anywhere, and I just dont have that kind of money at the moment. (Don't have any kind of money to be truthful)

us students, have it so bad

**Flightmapping** · 11-12-04

Alex,

I knew I meant to say something really obvious, but I forgot what it was.

Right, which three airlines fly direct from the UK to Hong Kong - ok, Cathay don't have a programme yet, but BA (BeFree) and Virgin do. See others posts about both of these though before plastering them all over your site!

Also, for a site focusing on one city, I'd be looking at a target of about 50 pages. Go and buy Lonely Planet Hong Kong city guide - have a look at what they do, and decide what sort of content you want to add to your site. Don't copy them, but they are always a good starting point.

And what went wrong with thefinanceguy - was it really so bad you had to take the site down?

If you want more advice re: the HK site, you might want to continue our pm / email dialogue. It would be interesting if you could respond on this thread about the finance site though, I'm sure others might be interested.

Lowndsy - finance sites may make more per visitor, although in my experience that gap is now closing. And there are many more visitors swimming around for travel products, so they balance each other out.

PS: Another point (and request for anyone else) - BA is too short to show up on a search, so can we try and refer to them as British Airways from now on. Or I'm sure "those late paying, over surcharging, (formerly) dirty tricks playing *******'s would do"

**CompareStore** · 12-12-04

The site looks really clean and neat however I would increase the font size on the left menu as it's a little hard to read.

**999gi** · 12-12-04

Just an observation, but use of the large fonts on the home page make it look at first glance like a news article rather than a portal about HK. Im not saying that is a bad thing necessarily just a bit confusing.

On this paragraph

"Here you will find information on the history of Hong Kong, some of the best places to visit, health advice for travellers to the country, and our partners can find you the cheapest flights, hotels, and car rentals. We also include a links section as well."

Id add links to the various bits so rather than just telling them what you offer, you make it easy for them to find it too. Wont hurt your SEO either

**alexwastell** · 12-12-04

Thanks guys, some really useful stuff here. Flightmapping, the finance site as it stood had a few legal points and to be honest I was a bit daunted by the legal aspects of it. I would have had to change it fairly significantly into a site that produced a bunch of links based on questions I asked to determine what the product the user wanted. This wouldn't have been so hard in itself, but I think a site like that with so much competition would have been extremely hard to get any traffic to, without using PPC, something which I just don't have a budget for right now. It is something I want to continue in the future when I get some money to play with though. I'll also drop you a Pm as you suggested. One more question now, where would I go to get inbound links to my site? Is it a case of just finding related sites and asking them to trade links? I'm going to really need tip top SEO for this without a PPC budget, I think.