I just launched my website and would like for people to offer constructive criticism. Layout? Color scheme? Fonts? Overall design? SEO optimization?
www.newtimejournal.com
Thank you!
Categorized | Affiliate Marketing 101
Need Constructive Website Critique?
Posted on January 2, 2013.
The first thing I would do personally is change “breaking news as they happen” to “breaking news as it happens”. If I were looking for news, that would make me leave immediately.
Second, the color might be appropriate if your going for a newspaper feel. There is a lot of black and white on your page. I would recommend at least a color header with a better logo and tag line. You gotta grab visitors straight away or they’ll leave straight away.
Looks like you have dynamic feeds coming in from multiple sources, so there is really no way to determine what keywords you are trying to rank for with your SEO. If you are trying to build an authority site with feed content, it’s not original, so you won’t rank for it. The original author will.
You can curate content with feeds, but you have to make each page unique to your site. A good way to do this is take top ten results for a keyword and curate them, to include new optimized images and embedded video. The idea would be to get all the most relevant results content all on your page.
As far as what keywords you should go for, you have to do some keyword research to find high volume and low competition keywords that would be easier to rank for. If you just launched your site, you wouldn’t be able to rank for keywords with high competition. You have to establish yourself as an authority first.
Hope this helps man. The good thing is that you are launching. Look at the top ten sites in your niche, see what they are doing. Group all those ideas together and make them your own.
Your website obviously lacks color, but the layout is also uncomfortable. You need to be able to see the top stories, but also get to what you want. I don’t like the 3 columns. Maybe try some borders on the sides as well, and perhaps put the ads their if you can. I’d also try a different font that is a bit smoother and more professional. Hope some of that helps