What's wrong with this site????????

sfollin · #1 (**permalink**) 11-08-2007, 09:15 PM

I have a good site....I think.I do have it themed one way,but does ask other questions in the contests.Is that it?I have tried to make it so the prizes can be won with as little effort as possible...I think.Everything seems to be pretty simple and easy,but why am I having trouble with signups?I hope someone can provide the something I am missing.I thank any help that somebody can give.

http://www.freewebs.com/stlcardinalsfanforever/

Theresa · #2 (**permalink**) 11-08-2007, 09:51 PM

Well here is my overall impression...

1. The background is very distracting. I would immediately hit the back space button upon entering your site if I hadn't gone there to review it.

2. First impression after the background is, "This is a sales page. I'm outta here."

3. I couldn't find anything of substance on the site to make me trust you enough to give you my email address.

If your target market is Cardinals fans, why not give them some Cardinals content. You could write articles about Cardinals trivia, history, current season, game reviews, player reviews and so on.

At this point from what I can see (I didn't visit every page) your site is only monetized with absolutely no content.

I am sorry for sounding so harsh and hope you'll forgive my bluntness. Best of luck with your site.

sfollin · #3 (**permalink**) 11-08-2007, 10:07 PM

I never thought of the background being a problem.
I do have Cards Questions on there,though.I also had several different pictures asking "who this is" as some questions also.
But what would not make it seem like a sells page?
Do the music,movie,etc questions pose the too much problem?What would it take for you to sign up?
I guess that's the question?

siyab · #4 (**permalink**) 11-08-2007, 10:08 PM

i second Theresa. at this moment, your site is

ssmorgan · #5 (**permalink**) 11-08-2007, 11:17 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by siyab

i second Theresa. at this moment, your site is

Sfollin,

First of all, Welcome to Website Babble, and I hope you're not discouraged!

Instead of focusing on design, I actually wanted to highlight the conceptual challenges that I see with the present model of your website.

Your target audience would be Cardinals fans... but in reality, anyone could look up this info and email you the answers... so why is it themed only for Cardinals fans if I (who may or may not know anything about the team) can find an answer to those questions.

Secondly, is it worth for me to sign up... Assuming that my name gets drawn up, by chance, as having answered both questions correctly, my prize would be $0.45... does not seem like it's worth the trouble.

You mentioned that when the site makes more, the prizes will increase in value... but in this case, you are encouraging marketers and business owners to pay you a monthly fee to have their banners posted on your website...

Here is the problem with this... why would I, as a marketer, pay you when I do not have info about how many visitors you get a month? or whether they are unique visitors? etc... Does this make sense?

Here is one way for you to work with your idea... perhaps, you can compile results, data, and trivia from baseball (which will probably be a ton of work)... which may eventually attract a lot of visitors... when you have that accomplished, sports related marketers/business owners may become interested in paying you to post their banners on their website.

Alternatively, if you want to stick to the Cardinals themed website, you can make it the Cardinals Fans Website... where you can attract Cardinals fans to your site by your team commentary, news, problems, issues, etc... and you can monetize it by selling Cardinals gears, season tickets, cardinals photo stamps, etc.

First, identify your audience, then figure out how to add value to their lives, hobbies, or passions (in this case, it may be their loyalty to the Cardinals).

Make sense? Please shoot us back with any questions... we're here to help!

Theresa · #6 (**permalink**) 11-08-2007, 11:33 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by sfollin

But what would not make it seem like a sells page?

Quote:

Originally Posted by sfollin

What would it take for you to sign up?

The answer to both questions is credibility. If you prove yourself to be credible, by having a clean professional website that has valuable content that I am interested in, then you have credibility in my eyes.

First determine who your target market is. I am assuming Cardinals fans based on your domain name and background. What are Cardinals fans looking for online?

Give them what they are looking for and you will have credibility in their eyes and they will like you. That is what generates conversions.

Lisa (the creator of this site) has a lot of valuable info for creating a quality website on her other website, the link to which is at the bottom of this page.

One free download in particular, Make Your Content Presell, I think would be of great value to you in helping to turn visitors into conversions. I am sure Lisa has it available on somewhere on her other site.

I hope this helps.

lisa · #7 (**permalink**) 11-09-2007, 12:05 AM

First of all, I have to say that I was born and raised in the S-T-L so kudos to the Cards!

Second, I am in agreement with Theresa and Sherif. I think you're jumping the gun a bit on the promotion and prizes before you have the traffic. The fact that your jackpot is up to $1.00 and your forum has zero posts really makes your site look deserted and you definitely don't want to have that, especially if you are encouraging participation. It makes your site look small-ish.

As the others have said, your best bet is to build up more content and put that in the forefront and wait until traffic picks up before advertising the contests.

Imagine if you got 300 hits per day from people typing in "Cardinal History" and 150 hits from people typing in "Cardinals Season Schedule", etc. etc. In order to get that kind of traffic you need much more content to get the search engines to find and rank you higher.

Check out www.selfpromotion.com for more details.

The thing is, you aren't going to get the signups until you build the credibility and traffic. Offering a useful site with bookmarkable information is one way to start attracting more people but you definitely want to read up on search engine optimization 101 and hold off on the jackpots, etc. until the traffic picks up.

You're off to a good start, though. You just jumped ahead of the game, so to speak.

Welcome to the forums by the way!

sfollin · #8 (**permalink**) 11-09-2007, 12:08 AM

I made some changes to the site.I've tried to better on what I thought the Fans might want.I added a forum to it.Because baseball fans tend to like to talk baseball.I also took out some of the pages that had nothing to do with baseball.I plan to add to the Q&A questions to better the prizes there.I also added some general statments about the guys and remembered one of those who was killed.I will also start write a personal view of my thoughts about the team also,and ask for them to go to the forum to post replies.Is that a better direction?Please take a look again and see if that helps?I also took out the background from the home page,maybe it will look better now....maybe...lol?

lisa · #9 (**permalink**) 11-09-2007, 12:15 AM

Hi again,

We posted at about the same time so I didn't want you to miss my comments about the forum above. I personally think you should hold off on a forum until the traffic comes but it's up to you.

I found out after trying to launch a forum on 4 different occasions that you need decent levels of traffic to get people to participate in forums.

I definitely think putting more facts about the players and team is the way to go but you still learn more about SEO as a whole (see my post above).

rooney · #10 (**permalink**) 11-11-2007, 06:04 AM

Hey sfollin,
I guess you and me have a lot in common. I have [link removed. See sig] and I had a lot of the same questions when I opened the site and blog. What I would suggest is going onto the Wikipedia and grabbing all the content for the Card's, rewrite it and put up pages about History, Championships, Hall of Fame, etc. You have a good chance to really make that site a popular one. One impression I got was there wasnt enough information about the Cards.

As far as design goes, I would suggest try setting the background color to the shade of red that the Cards use on there logo. Then under the title of the site put in a smaller cropped image of the stadium (like this >> http://www.red-sox-fan.net/images/cards.jpg . What you really want to do is make your mark in the design as a Card fan site, but at the same time not taking away from other elements with over powering design elements. Which sometimes can be hard.

I would agree with Lisa about the forums, try and focus on getting the content and visitors, then work on the more advanced and time consuming features (ie: blog, forum, etc.). I would also suggest you setup a myspace profile and use it to link to your site, then go around and add card fans. This in turn will covert into a lot of visitors.

Hope this advise helps, if you have any questions pm or email me.

Dave

WB Sponsors