Website Review and Suggestions

#1 (permalink)

I have been working on my site (link below) for a few months. I update the news part of the site every day with a new article and I update the rest of the site occasionally. I have been fairly happy with the amount of traffic I have been getting (400-700 visits per day sometimes even over 1,000), but recently the traffic has been getting seemingly random (1,000+ one day than down to 100-200 the next day).

I am hoping to try out some new forms of promotion (previously and currently only submitting content to Linux news sites) soon (any help with this would be appreciated), but before I start going crazy trying to promote my site, I wanted to know if anyone has ideas for improving it?

I asked once before for ideas for improving my site when I first started and one criticism was the lack of a cooler color, but I could never figure out how to do this in a way that looked good. Any thoughts on this would also be appreciated.

Wow that was long! Site URL:

http://www.linuxloop.com/

Thanks so much!

Update: I just made some very major changes to the design of the site. Details in post below.

#2 (permalink)

First of all

1) good job for being subtle on the ads. Me likey.
2) good choice of colors. Reminds me of Ubuntu.
3) nice domain name.

I think images would work nicely in your favour if you make it work well with the rest of the design. There's nothing better than eye candy amidst all the text, you know? I might suggest coming up with a slightly more prominent logo, too, just so that it doesn't get lost in the text.

On Firefox your linux news blog archives comes up a bit funky, pushing down the categories and the interesting links. Just a small note.

As for promotion, here goes the fun part. I would suggest using Google Adsense for a while to see if you can get a few new readers. I would also make your feed more prominent, because I've realized that a lot of people like reading on the go.


I'll write more if I come up with any ideas.

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#3 (permalink)

Thanks!
Hmm... I agree, but I am no good at all with graphics. (Note the lack of graphics on my site.) Where on my site were you thinking graphics would be good?
Edit: I have tried including images of a product I am talking about, but the images provided by the manufacturer often have a white bg.
On one hand, I sort of like my current logo, but, on the other hand, I suspect your right. I was just thinking about expanding the little bar at the top to make more space for the navigation and possibly an ad unit too (). If I did this I would also include a larger logo, but, once again, that would require that I make another graphic. Do you think something like this would be a good idea?
Thanks for pointing that out. I can't reproduce it, so I am not sure how to fix it. I just tried on Linux (Ubuntu 7.10), OS X Tiger, and Windows Vista all running the latest version of Firefox. What OS are you using?
I assume you mean Google Adwords? I have tried Adwords on a previous site. I am not a big fan of paying to promote sites, but I guess I should give it a try. Thanks for the suggestion! I might try implementing that in the next few days.
Done. I could now give an entire rant about feedicons.com. First I downloaded the standard icons. They come in .png format. Than I downloaded the "developer" icons. Some of those are in GIF, but the permissions are set to owner can read and write and no one else can even view them. Fairly simple to solve, though.

Thanks so much for all the ideas!

#4 (permalink)

As viewed on Firefox 2.0.0.11 on an XP, 1024x768. AdWords is what I meant and I've seen pretty promising results with my other websites, for very little $$$ too.

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#5 (permalink)

Problem is fixed. Thanks! I cut the spacing between the logo and the nav from 100px down to 55px.

Before I start Adsense, do you think I should make my ads more aggressive?
Also, how much do you recommend as a max $ per click?

Thanks!

Anyone else have ideas for my site?

Update: I looked into my eCPM on adsense and I doubt that adwords is going to work unless I make my ads a lot more aggressive. Based on my adsense eCPM, for adwords to even break even I would need to get 10 clicks for 1 cent.

#6 (permalink)

I just redid the navigation bar at the top making my logo much more obvious. I would like to know what people think now. Thanks!