Site review request - feedback appreciated

[crowngate]

Hi,

I have been working on my site for the last 3 months, I'm doing it on my days off from my day job, currently working 4 on/off 12 hour shifts. I see it just as a hobby at the moment and hopefully make a bit of extra money. As well a learning new skills.

It's been a steep learning curve, but enjoyable at the same time.

Please can you review my site and give some feedback. Really welcome constructive criticism and pointers. I know there are many things i need to do, but a bit of direction from the pros on here would be great!

http://betting-uk.org

P.S. Thanks for all that post on this forum, learnt a lot from your experiences.

[davemerry]

Hi crowngate, congrats on the new site! I remember the days of building outside my day job, I actually get sentimental when I talk about them!

It's a nice design over all and has some clear call to actions, which is what I think a lot of new sites lack. I've given a few pointers based on my preferences below:

1. It loads very slow - if I was a player looking for some quick offers I may have turned back. In fact, it crashed my browser when I started writing this post

2. How did you build this? The source code is quite horrific (putting it blunt) considering their is no dynamic elements on the page. Re-building this cleanly would certainly improve page load in general.

3. Why are the links in images? I can't work out whether they are SIFR or just javascript rollovers - maybe I'm just weird but I prefer standard text links, for both SEO and usability.

To be honest apart from the way it is rendered I quite like the site, good work and I wish you all the best with it!

Cheers,
Dave

[crowngate]

Thanks for the points Dave.

I'm using moonfruit to build the site, which can be quite slow to load(Found this out after I've put in some hours!). I've found ways to improve the loading time, just need to find the time to put it in place. The pictures are are a bit mismatched at the moment and will be changed to look more professional and uniformed.

[TCDC]

Hey Crowngate,

Congrats on your site it looks really good.

Your site has everything mine doesn't - content

I see you are going for a specific niche - at the same time I curious how you determined your rankings when the site is new?

If you care to share...

Thanks & have a good night

T

[crowngate]

TCDC,

Not sure what you mean by determining my rankings? Sorry if its blindingly obvious!

[TCDC]

Hi Crowngate - For example - you have a bunch of sites you are promote from top to bottom.

As a new site - what criteria did you use to determine which banner was at the top & which was at the bottom etc?

Thanks!

T

[crowngate]

Didn't really consider it to be honest.

[baldidiot]

I agree with dave here - the site loading speed is something that really needs looking at. It doesn't matter how great the site is if the users all leave before the page finishes loading.

I've never heard of moonfruit before so can't comment, but it sounds like you might want to find an alternate solution. I'm a big fan of joomla myself, a lot of others like wordpress.

[gamblingdomainer]

The body content where you have Rugby, Football, etc. is in flash. You might want to reconsider this and put it in HTML for search engines to crawl your pages.

I also feel the reason for slow loading is too much of flash content.....

Also, at the top, you have an option for guests to login, so you should also have an option for them to "register".

[crowngate]

Thanks guys, i'm going to have to look at a re-design here.

[HodgeyBoy]

HI crowngate, I like your freebet creative stacked down the right hand side of each page but I think that by having so many of them you could be diluting the effect and performance of them.

I would reduce the number by at least half. Still feature all those brands if you like but deeper into your site on dedicated review pages. If you can start to show results and also offer a modicum of 'exclusivity' for those home-page slots down the right then you might find that you can command a higher price for those positions from operators.

I also noticed that in some places like http://betting-uk.org/#/horse-racing-odds/4551930283 you have odds listed, including ones from us but that for each of the three bookies when I click on the price offered I arrive at a landing page. I'm all for landing pages but if I've clicked on a price then I want to end up somewhere relevant to that - either the specific market or preferably a betslip.

This might be something you've been meaning to get around to, in which case, if you check out this link you'll find instructions on using our XML feed and also integrating them into an external betslip

Hope this helps - good job on the site!

[crowngate]

Thanks for the input Anthony.

I agree with having too many free bets is distracting, too much choice n all. With the horse racing odds, it's just a case of getting round to it.

Please keep the comments coming, learning a lot here!

[monsterbet]

hiya matey

nice site, you could try and speed it up by using image sprites to reduce the number of http requests and page size. on a few pages the top nav bar drop down goes under some of the main page content, you can fix this using z index. At the bottom of the site i don't know if it's intentional but the white background does not go to the bottom of the page, you can fix this by placing #clear {clear:both} in the css...and then div id="clear" /div (with brackets ) in your page just before the closing div for all the elements your trying to cover. hope this helps.

[GFPC]

There is also another reason to possibly not have flash on the site.

I use firefox - and use a application called flash block. 90/100 times when i get to sites that are in flash i just hit the back button.

When i disabled the function it took me approx 10 seconds to see the page.

Looks very nice and well done .

[BHL]

The google +1 button is hard to implement too btw. I tried it in so many ways. Really.. must have wasted like 6+ hours on it. And no matter how I added the code it added too much loading time. So I removed it. Oh and you should use firebug and check the net tab to check out the loading times. Very useful!

[lowrisk]

I think the main issue is the load time personally, I completely agree with what Dave said, it also crashed my browser too.

Google states that optimum load time should be no more than 3.5 seconds, try using a few page load time checkers and see if you can optimise it to improve it to an optimum level. As if I was a visitor who had stumbled on your site, and it crashed my browser on the first ever visit. Then I can say I probably wouldn't return.

[Casinorep]

I think it is a bit too clusttered and that could confuse the readers. I would keep the odds section on the top portion and maybe remove some content towards the bottom and keep it a tad more simplistic.

[crowngate]

Thanks for the input guys, I'm looking to redesign the site making it faster to load and a bit simpler to use. Hopefully should have it ready for next weekend.

[jannes]

Looks good, I really like the offers on the right side of the page.

[crowngate]

I've done a re-design to my homepage, which hopefully makes it look a bit more professional and easier to use. I think it still loads a bit slow, but faster than before. Gonna work on site reviews next and sorting my content out.

Slowly learning to plan things out first, just giving myself extra work to do! All fun though.