Please review my website

[Angela Brown488]

Thanks all for this great forum that allows us all have a glimpse of what people think of our sites and blogs.....
Please review my website, and waiting for your comments... the Home Page (http://egyptopia.com)
I'd appreciate any advice from experts about increasing traffic at this new site, if possible
Any feedback, evaluation, suggestion is greatly appreciated! And multiple thanks in advance…..!!

[the goat]

Welcome, your site looks good. In my opinion you should not have full page pop up type ads, I leave sites immediately if the entire page suddenly turns into an ad.

Also your lead paragraph on the home page has quite a few grammatical errors (I realize english may be your second language so I'll try and help):


Welcome to Egyptopia.com, your new gate for Egypt, with thousands of articles, photgraphies covering all Egypt's monuments and places. You can visit Cairo, Alexandria, Luxor, Aswan, the Red Sea, the Oasis and more. And do not forget to have a look at Egypt delicous dishes in our recipes section.You can also participate in our forums about any topic, photography, news or product in Egyptopia.com.

That should read more like this:


Welcome to Egyptopia.com, your gateway to Egypt, with thousands of articles and photgraphs of Egypt's monuments and destinations. You can visit Cairo, Alexandria, Luxor, Aswan, the Red Sea, the Oasis and more.

Don't forget to have a look at the many delicious Egyptian dishes in our recipes section and you can also participate in our forums. Our members discuss many topics including photography, news and products from Egyptopia.com.

That is a pre-coffee quick fix and by no means great writing but it is at least grammatically correct.

Other than that it looks like a great site, good job!

[vangogh]

Angela my first thought is the site seems very crowded. There's so much information on the page it's hard to know where to look right away. You do a good job making it clear what the site is about. The domain Egyptopia is a good one and right away I see images that immediately make me think of Egypt. If I arrived at your site look for information about Egypt, I would know I was in the right place.

Still it might be too much information right away. Maybe less info on the home page. Keep things brief there and help people find their way quickly to what they want.

In the sidebar on the left I notice the menus aren't aligned. It would look much better if they were. The one of the top looks like it has an extra <ul></ul> around it causing it to be indented more. I'm also not seeing a heading for the links at the top. I'm looking at the site through Firefox by the way.

When I click through the site I'm mostly seeing ads everywhere. More ads than content. If I were to arrive at your site, I probably wouldn't stay long. As soon as the ads started popping up I'd leave and never return. Offer more content. Give people a reason to stick around on the site. There's nothing wrong with having ads on the site, but too many will drive people away. If you build a good informational site you'll likely find better ways to make money with it too. For example your site could describe Egypt in a way that makes me want to visit right away and then offer something in the way of a travel package I might sign up for.

As it is now you're best hope is having a few people finding the site through a search engine and clicking on AdSense. That's probably not going to make much money or you. Better to have less ads and more informational content to build a valuable resource about your country. If you can build a valuable site you can find ways to better make money with it.

[Jagella]

Thanks all for this great forum that allows us all have a glimpse of what people think of our sites and blogs.....
Please review my website, and waiting for your comments... the Home Page (http://egyptopia.com)
I'd appreciate any advice from experts about increasing traffic at this new site, if possible
Any feedback, evaluation, suggestion is greatly appreciated! And multiple thanks in advance…..!!

Hi Angela:

Congratulations on your website. You'll never suffer a shortage of people who want to know about Egypt's culture, history, and mythology. It's great to see that you're offering free information about Egypt, and I like to look for websites that constitute, in effect, free books.

Some of your graphics, like the statue on the mythology page, overlap the links. You should not have graphics overlapping links.

The Forum link appears twice on the navigation bar. You only need it once, of course.

I get an error when I click on your Contact Us link.

On your Register page, you should explain the benefits of registration. What services and content can I get if I register?

Your search results page is too wide,and I need to scroll horizontally to see the content on the right. Some of that content on the right is cut off.

To sum up, I'd strongly recommend that you hone your page layout to fit everything in without cutting-off or overlapping elements. Also, try to make sure your links work.

Anyway, I strongly encourage you to pursue this website. It's a great idea that deserves to be on the Web.

Jagella

[Jagella]

Still it might be too much information right away. Maybe less info on the home page. Keep things brief there and help people find their way quickly to what they want.

Steve, I've thought about this issue a lot. It's common for web pages to be crammed with links and content. It can be very confusing, and I literally don't know where to start. It seems like there's no visual hierarchy.

One solution might be to use some kind of hierarchy for both links and content. In Angela's case, for instance, on the “Egypt” page, she might simply provide a link to “Regions in Egypt” rather than list all those links on the “Egypt” page. The linked page, “Regions in Egypt,” can then list those links. In other words, organize the site like a pyramid (no pun intended) with the home page at the apex linked to pages on a lower level. The pages on each level are linked to pages on lower levels that contain subcategories of information.

Well, I know I'm not the first designer to come up with this idea, but a lot of designers don't seem to bother with it. (Not to pick on Angela)

Jagella

[Just H]

Angela, nice idea for a site. I just skimmed it but notice a few things right off - the bullets on the left as VG mentioned and then on other pages some of the bottom ones turn to asterisks. There does seem to be way too many ads - it would turn me off immediately, espec when I see the unrelated ones like Before and After for wrinkles and Cut Down on Stomach Fat. The Google ads that run horizontally across the top of the page look as if they're the header - which usually is a page title. And the layout on the home page seems a bit cluttered where nothing really stands out to me.

Also, in my version (Mozilla Firefox 3.0.7), the Copyright line is overwriting something on every page and some of the images are overlapping text (like on the page: Ancient Egyptian Religion & Myths & History of Egypt).

In your header, I notice you have the text and image in one jpg file where the text color looks distorted. If it's supposed to look that way, disregard. Otherwise, slice into 2 separate images making the text a gif or png to so the letters are sharp and clear.

The Register and About Us buttons are touching and the others have white space between them.

Lots of little things but looks good overall. Hope that helps.