Looking to attract more visitors,

[sford999]

Hi,

I`m looking to improve my site to get more visitors and hopefully submissions to the various areas (articles/reviews glossary/forums/etc....).

All ideas will be taken into consideration, and most likely most will be implimented in one way or another.

Theres a few sections unavailable atm due to being redesigned/coded, but they`ll be online shortly.

The site is www.carpfishinguk.net

Thanks in advance

[moberemk]

Um... yeah, I can't help you here, because, as it turns out, I have absolutely NO clue what carp is.

[Vex]

You need to find your target audience, by the looks of it, you're into the fishing category. So your best bet is to go on a search around the 'net for forums and other websites that share the same topics as you. Then from there tell them about your site. Its all about exposure, the more people you can get to see your URL, the more people you'll have clicking it.

[neylitalo]

[!--quoteo(post=364957:date=Apr 14 2006, 07:55 PM:name=moberemk)--][div class=\'quotetop\']QUOTE(moberemk @ Apr 14 2006, 07:55 PM) [snapback]364957[/snapback][/div][div class=\'quotemain\'][!--quotec--] Um... yeah, I can't help you here, because, as it turns out, I have absolutely NO clue what carp is. [/quote]

You don't need to know what a carp is to give suggestions on a site. ;) (btw, it's a fish - a really ugly fish that's good for bait and nothing else.)

I have a few suggestions:

Get rid of the outside border. It looks messy.

Give your navigation & advertisement sections some background colors. And take the advertisements section out until you get something in there.

Make your headings actually stand out. It doesn't help that "Welcome to Carp Fishing UK" is smaller than the rest of it. And make the individual articles stand out a bit; give them a border and background of some kind?

Keep the main background white, but give all your other sections a background of some kind.

Take the picture of the fish out of the background and put it in the header image, somewhere. It's distracting. (I've never seen a carp like that... all the carp up here are ultra ugly)

Make your links stand out. An underline or something - anything.

And please, please make the header image easier on the eyes - the bright yellow and bright blue don't go well together.

Once you've made a few changes, let us know, and we'll go for round 2. :)

[steviewdr]

Ya - get onto discussion boards and reply with information/answers that YOU have on your website. It really worked for me and kart plans ( [a href=\"http://www.kartbuilding.net\" target=\"_blank\"]http://www.kartbuilding.net[/a] ). Things take time also - so be patient. "Build it and they will come".

Rgds,
Steve

[ober]

1) Make it look like a fish site. When I get to the site, I don't expect it to be about fish. I should see water, I should see live fish (in pics, of course), I should see anything but a cheesy, mid-90ish style banner image.

2) Try and match up your colors. Your header is a fairly bright blue... your box headers are darker blue and your footer is yet ANOTHER blue. And then you have a TON of white space. I'd kill the whitespace in the background of the site (the non-text areas), I'd put another color behind the nav, and I'd try to match up the other areas a little better.

3) [b]WHY IS ALL YOUR TEXT BOLD[/b]? That has to be the most annoying approach/mistake I see webmasters make. Your text doesn't need to be bold to be readable. If you can't read it, increase the font size slightly... don't BOLD ALL YOUR TEXT. Bolding the main text loses the distinction between the nav and the content.

4) Do something more with the nav. Seperate each link with lines, make the hover more powerful (change background color, do something tricky with borders, or hell... even make the color change more drastic).

5) Does the site need to be full-width? Something tells me it doesn't. I think there are very few sites that require a full-width site and this is not one of them. Personally, I think the only reason a site should be full-width is if it has enough content to fill it. You don't.

6) Contact page: if I screw up, show me the form again WITH the error messages. Don't just show me the error messages and then make me hit the back button. And show me which fields are required.

7) Guestbook: WHY? No one uses these anymore and it looks rather unprofessional, IMO. Remove it.

8) Rigs/Tackle: get some better images. Those are so blurry and boring, it makes your site look unprofessional.

9) No surprise... it fails validation miserably. And on top of that, you're using tables for layout. For shame.

10) Link your CSS. Don't include it in each page. That does 2 things: a) it keeps your CSS in one place so you only have to edit it once to have the changes show up everywhere and b) it doesn't clutter your source pages.

[sford999]

ok I`ve completely changed things here is the new look that i`ve come up with: [a href=\"http://www.carpfishinguk.net/new/index.html\" target=\"_blank\"]http://www.carpfishinguk.net/new/index.html[/a]

[steelmanronald06]

What i don't get is this. It involves people who can design. they make a crap layout, get told it looks like crap, and then within two days go back and make an even better one. why not shoot for the stars the first time? btw, the second link you posted looks better than the first, hence this post. LOL.