Starting a new venture - Looking forward to hearing your advice.

[DailyFitness4u]

Hi all, my name is Paul and along with my son Phil, who is a qualified Personal Trainer, I have set up a new business called DailyFitness4u. We are based in the south of England and will obviously be dealing with clients locally but it is our website which we hope will create most of our business. It is a membership site designed to help people worldwide (especially business people) get into a regular routine of health and fitness.

This is our first proper business venture so we are always seeking good advice from those who are more experienced, hence our reason for joining this forum. And I feel it's important to get the perspective from people in the US and other parts of the world so that we can make our site user friendly to all potential customers.

Anyway our site can be found at DailyFitness4u (http://www.DailyFitness4u.com) if you would like to take a look, and I look forward to talking with some of you and hearing some good advice.

[Harold Mansfield]

Paul, welcome to the forum. Since you've combined your introduction with asking for a review, I'm going to move this thread over to reviews so that you'll get some feedback.

[DailyFitness4u]

Thanks Harold, Yes I would be happy for other members to take a look at my site and provide some feedback. It's still a work in progress and things are being added all the time but please have a look and let me know what you think.

[KristineS]

I took a quick look and the first thing I noticed was, at least for me, the pages took forever to load. Long enough that if I were just browsing for information, I'd probably leave. So you might want to check the load rates on your pages and the bounce rates on your site. If people are waiting too long for the pages to load, they might be leaving before they get the info they need. To be honest, the long load time kept me from looking through the rest of the site.

[Harold Mansfield]

Your load time is very long. I see that you're using WordPress. If it's not your hosting it's probably an easy fix; Too many or conflicting plug ins, clutter of your root are generally the usual suspects.

The fact that you have a site up is good. The fact that you created a video is also good. So give yourself credit for both of those things.
Styling could be much better and you could probably use some branding help.

You have the right idea, you're just not presenting it well.

[DailyFitness4u]

Thanks Kristine & Harold for taking the time to look at the site. I did notice a problem with loading times but was hoping it was just my end. I've spent the day going through all the recommendations to help speed up wordpress without much success. I have a feeling it could be related to my hosting. I am with a good company and on a business package but I have noticed huge differences on load times at different times of day and as my site is only getting light traffic at the moment i think it must be to do with being on a shared server. My host is looking into it so I'll have to wait and see what happens.

I'll let you know when things are fixed.

[aaronhorowitz]

I like that you have a three-tiered pricing structure. If you're using Wordpress, there are some free plugins you could use to make the pricing structure more apparent. The plugin I use is Easy Pricing Tables by Fatcat Apps. I would also recommend making that 14-day money back guarantee pop out more. You could get a 14-day money-back guarantee badge from a site like Fotolia (http://www.fotalia.com). Another thing I noticed was you don't have a mailing list sign-up form. You could sign up for a free Mail Chimp account and download the Mail Chimp plugin for Wordpress which would allow you to put an email address collection form on your front page. Just some suggestions, but good site overall.

[DailyFitness4u]

I like that you have a three-tiered pricing structure. If you're using Wordpress, there are some free plugins you could use to make the pricing structure more apparent. The plugin I use is Easy Pricing Tables by Fatcat Apps. I would also recommend making that 14-day money back guarantee pop out more. You could get a 14-day money-back guarantee badge from a site like Fotolia (http://www.fotalia.com). Another thing I noticed was you don't have a mailing list sign-up form. You could sign up for a free Mail Chimp account and download the Mail Chimp plugin for Wordpress which would allow you to put an email address collection form on your front page. Just some suggestions, but good site overall.

Thanks for the suggestions and taking the time to have a look at the site. I will have a look at the items you recommend. Thanks.

[DailyFitness4u]

I've made some adjustments to the site and hopefully the load time is now better. It's very hard to tell as all the speed check web tools seem to give different readings and conflicting information. I know it is loading much quicker in my browser and I would like to know if it has improved for others in different parts of the world.

[Blessed]

Hey Paul!

It's still a slow load for me tonight - but we're having bad weather... so maybe that's the issue? I can try again Monday!

[Swank]

Hey!

I suggest you go to other fitness websites, preferably of larger fitness brands and compare your to theirs. You will often find their ones are very 'clean'. The website is nice, however if I went on it looking for training it would make me perceive your business as unprofessional that's just what I get from the website. Websites play a big role on how the customer perceives the value of the business.

Just my opinion.

Some websites you should look at;
EQUINOX - IT'S NOT FITNESS. IT'S LIFE. (http://www.equinox.com/)
Mid-City Gym - Midtown Manhattan, New York, NY (http://midcitygym.com/)
Interesting, clean and easy to use.

[DailyFitness4u]

Thanks for the comments and suggestions everyone. I took a long hard look at the site over the weekend and decided to do a revamp to give it a cleaner more modern look. I would very much appreciate any comments on the facelift. Thanks