Your Comments on my Website Please
-
Please post constructive comments about my website:
http://www.thewebhostinghero.com
Some of the stuff you may want to look at:
- Free tools: http://www.thewebhostinghero.com/free-tools
- Web host lookup: http://www.thewebhostinghero.com/who_is_hosting.php
- Articles, news, tutorials: http://www.thewebhostinghero.com/blog
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/WebHostingHero
I'm still weighting the option of building a new website and if I do, I want to make sure I won't do the same mistakes again.
Don't be scared to be brutal... but constructive.
Thank you
Stephane
-
What do you think about the new homepage layout?
I know I still have a lot of work to do, I'm still working on the About and Disclosure pages, the old ones are still there in the meantime.
-
Thank you Daniel for these great suggestions. I will get at it right away.
You see, I'm a programmer so this is the biggest part of my involvement in this site. I know very little about the other aspects and that's what I'm trying to improve.
-
I completely missed the "valuable content" including the tutorials the first time around. I spent 10 minutes on the site -- about 9 minutes and 45 seconds longer than most people will spend. Which highlights the problem. The good stuff is buried. The initial impression is of a very dubious site.
It is not at all clear what the purpose of the site is at first glance. So users are forced to try to find out who created it. But they will fail because the information is not there.
**Constructive Suggestion: **Include a Mission Statement near your logo. Something like: "Your independent expert guide to website hosting." (If that's what you're doing.)
**Constructive Suggestion: **Completely reorganize your navigation and UX. Eliminate extraneous material.
The most important page on any website of this kind is the about page. You don't have one. See this article on About Pages. (Note: by de-cloaking, I simply meant revealing who you are on page.)
Try looking at this website by my client Jon-Erik Kawamoto for an example of a good About page that establishes the site owner's credentials. The site also surfaces valuable content. It uses a blog format and the right hand column sorts content by category and also recent highlights.
The other part of the right hand column includes some affiliate marketing stuff.
Along the same lines, take a look at this site by my former client Jon Goodman. There is a wealth of free material, along with some premium products and affiliate promotions in the right hand column.
Constructive Suggestion: Try highlighting your best tools and content on the home page, perhaps in promtional boxes.
-
When I started this affiliate website about 5 years ago, I basically did the same thing that other affiliate sites did.
The reason why I posted this thread is that I'm aware of this and I want to take the website to another level. Eventually, I would like to get rid of the affiliate marketing business model and go toward selling advertisement instead. I'm not sure yet. But I can't do this all overnight. I need to get there gradually.
-
(By the way, sorry for my english, I speak french!)
Well I don't mind brutal comments but I also asked for constructive comments.
That said, I appreciate your honesty however it's easy to bash something without suggesting how to make it better.
1. "The fatal flaw is the anonymity. No sensible person would ever attach any importance to buying reccomendations that come out of nowhere from an anonymous nobody."
I do agree with you on that. Now how do I solve this? Should I include a byline with my picture in every post?
2. "Worse, this garbled, illogical and contradictory disclosure is deeply buried in a footer and confirms worst suspicions"
I admit I simply copied the disclosure policy sent to affiliates by some web hosting companies. Do you have any examples of what you consider to be a clear, concise disclosure?
3. "I'm not saying affiliate marketing is always and everywhere wrong. But first you have decloak [...]"
What do you mean by "decloak"? To me, "cloaking" is showing a different content to search engines than to visitors.
4. "[...] publish valuable content free [...]"
Did you look at the 220 tutorials I published? I put a ton of effort into them to make them as valuable as possible. Unlike many web hosting sites, I DO know my stuff, I've been a programmer, web developer and sysadmin for more than 18 years.
http://www.thewebhostinghero.com/category/tutorials
That said, there is some early content that makes me cringe a little when read them. I'm setting them to "noindex" and removing them gradually.
I also provide some free tools I've developed myself and I think this one is especially useful:
http://www.thewebhostinghero.com/speed/
If you think the content is not valuable enough, please explain a bit further.
As for the top 10 lists, they will soon be transformed into valuable buying guides instead of simple comparison grids.
5. "The basic pitch is that you would never jeopardize your reputation by recommending anyting other than valuable products you use yourself."
I do have accounts with most of the hosting companies advertised or listed in any top 10 lists (of course I get them for free most of the time). Obviously, I can't run 20 "real websites" just to use these services so what I did is I set up an identical blog on each of them and I perform benchmark test regularly.
Like I said, constructive comments are welcomed!
-
You asked for brutality, so here goes:
The site looks, feels and smells like a scam.
The fatal flaw is the anonymity. No sensible person would ever attach any importance to buying reccomendations that come out of nowhere from an anonymous nobody.
Worse, this garbled, illogical and contradictory disclosure is deeply buried in a footer and confirms worst suspicions:
"This blog is a personal blog written and edited by me. This blog accepts forms of cash advertising, sponsorship, paid insertions or other forms of compensation.
The compensation received may influence the advertising content, topics or posts made in this blog. That content, advertising space or post may not always be identified as paid or sponsored content.
The owner(s) of this blog is not compensated to provide opinion on products, services, websites and various other topics. The views and opinions expressed on this blog are purely the blog owners. If we claim or appear to be experts on a certain topic or product or service area, we will only endorse products or services that we believe, based on our expertise, are worthy of such endorsement. Any product claim, statistic, quote or other representation about a product or service should be verified with the manufacturer or provider."
I'm not saying affiliate marketing is always and everywhere wrong. But first you have decloak, publish valuable content free, and then be much more transparent in your disclosure. The basic pitch is that you would never jeopardize your reputation by recommending anyting other than valuable products you use yourself.
-
How would that make the website better?
I want to get comments on the content quality.
-
Actually Martin ,sorry, I misread your reply and should not be questioning your logic in this case
-
Header image is great but instead of header.png you could name it the-web-hosting-hero-header.png. The same for others pics
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
2 domain pointing to same website, how to resolve it?
My site customer has 2 domains pointing to the same site. So i have 2 domains with the same content, with problems about content duplication. How can i resolve this situation?
On-Page Optimization | | Maximilian210 -
Is Disqus as good for SEO as a built in comment system on your website?
Disqus is a simple tool you can use to easily get comments up and running on your website. Does it have the same value as a built in comment feature such as a Wordpress blog or does Google not attribute the Disqus comments to the websites content as it would for Wordpress?
On-Page Optimization | | Trellis0 -
When You Add a Robots.txt file to a website to block certain URLs, do they disappear from Google's index?
I have seen several websites recently that have have far too many webpages indexed by Google, because for each blog post they publish, Google might index the following: www.mywebsite.com/blog/title-of-post www.mywebsite.com/blog/tag/tag1 www.mywebsite.com/blog/tag/tag2 www.mywebsite.com/blog/category/categoryA etc My question is: if you add a robots.txt file that tells Google NOT to index pages in the "tag" and "category" folder, does that mean that the previously indexed pages will eventually disappear from Google's index? Or does it just mean that newly created pages won't get added to the index? Or does it mean nothing at all? thanks for any insight!
On-Page Optimization | | williammarlow0 -
Website in a frame
Following situation. Domain A is indexed at google , it use a frame within this frame a website is hosted from another domain. Because it not workes proper (all url's where only the main url from domain A) The webdesigner deleted domain A , the url's are delered from the google index. (some ranked well) (position 3) Now all url's from Domain B are in the index , but on a bad position (position 74) Now i want to move the website from domain A to domain B (and add a redirect 301) Will domain A gets his position in the google index B ? (All things happened 4 weeks ago) does anyone have other ideas how to get the position back ? Thanx in advance
On-Page Optimization | | digspinat0 -
Rel Canonical - Could someone please help confirm something?
Morning Mozzers, I'm looking at a site (www.zitan.co.uk) and making a few recommendations for SEO, one of the things I've spotted is something weird with rel canonical. It looks (to me) as if they've got almost every single page set with this tag: rel="canonical" href="http://www.zitan.co.uk" /> I'm 99% certain that this means that every page on the site (that has this tag) is pointing all link juice / authority back to the homepage? If someone could please check and just confirm that, I'd really appreciate it. Thanks in advance, James
On-Page Optimization | | JamesMio0 -
Is It better to have a blogroll style Homepage to your website? or one main post?
Does a site rank better or is it better to have a blogroll style homepage linking to all of your other post in your website. Or is it better to have one homepage post for the main keyword theme of the website, with the other post titles in a side column?
On-Page Optimization | | nyphenom0 -
How do websites display product attributes listed with their meta descriptions in Google SEPRs?
If you take a look at this SERP for "boys costumes" you can see that Amazon, HalloweenExpress and Target all have attributes listed such as "Products 1-25 of 500" or Kids Legolas _Costume. _ These are getting blended with their meta descriptions. How are they doing this? Anyone see any lifts in ranking or CTR by doing this? Thank you!
On-Page Optimization | | Troyville0 -
SEO for spanish website
Hi, A client has given us the site http://www.comtranslations.com/Home.html for optimization. He wants to optimize only the spanish part ( the link is on the top right ). By clicking on the link Espanol, the url opened is - http://www.comtranslations.com/Principal.html. He wants seo for this website for spanish keywords. The keywords are - Traducción
On-Page Optimization | | seoug_2005
Traductor
traducir español inglés
traducción My question is how do we go about this ? Shall we purchase a software that translates spanish to english ? Thanks0