New(ish) site- feedback and introduction

[freeeasy]

Hi everyone and firstly apologies if this post is in the wrong place!

I've had my site up and running for about 5 months now and its slowly getting there but would be glad to recive any feedback from any of the experts out there.

the site is www.freeeasybets.com

I built it myself from scratch with no prior it knowledge therefore it was painful, time consuming and frustrating but ultimately a rewarding experinace!

Anyway loking forward to contributing to the forum as and when I can...

Cheers

Geoff

[thepokerkeep]

Welcome to the private forums.

[baldidiot]

I'm liking the countdown to the world cup! And that's a nice logo too, do you mind if I asked who designed that? Did you do it your self or outsource it?

[universal4]

I like the layout and feel of the site and to be honest I am often turned off by dark backgrounds but this fits well.

Riuck
Universal4

[clearlyportals]

Hi Freeeasy,

Nice site, just a couple of things:

Clicking the Promotions button takes me to a 404:
http://freeeasybets.com/easy/index.p...d=17&Itemid=19

Secondly, just a personal thing, but you seem to be using Joomla with the default urls, using the inbuilt seo and a bit of url rewriting, you can easily make urls go from:

http://freeeasybets.com/easy/index.p...&view=register

to:

http://freeeasybets.com/register.html

And:

http://freeeasybets.com/easy/index.p...d=28&Itemid=27

to:

http://freeeasybets.com/beat-victor.html

This is just my preference, and I think it looks better in google searches to have a descriptive URL. Might index your pages better.

Also, clicking on your tabs such as ‘Regular Offers’ or ‘Game Offers’ takes me to a minimal page telling me to click somewhere else. This could amalgamate all the information from those sub sections in a nice format with some great call to actions? Think you are missing something here.

I also think your pages could have better call to actions generally, for instance, where do I click on your ‘Whats Hot’ page? Put in some big ‘Bet Now’ buttons or ‘Claim Free Bet’ buttons?

Other than that, nice looking site and thing it's got potential to do better

[freeeasy]

Thanks for the brillant feed back- the bits about the urls make sense although I not sure I understand the technical aspect of them! (does that make sense??).

I've had a quick look on the web and this page seems to cover off what you mean- does this look right and I will give it a go?
http://www.search-friendly-web-desig...che-modrewrite

Really apprecaited

[clearlyportals]

Hey freeeasy

This looks quite good. Try and follow that. Test locally first.

One thing i'm not sure is why your site has '/easy' by default?

Best thing would be to create a test site somehwere where you can play around make sure you have done it correctly.

If you need any help PM me

[freeeasy]

I'm not sure either to be honest- its a just host site on joomla but I wonder if it may effect my seo. mmmnnn

I will try it out and see what happens although luckily enough I've just bought a couple of domain names so might set up a dummy on that.

Cheers for help.

Not sure how I can return favoutr to be honest!

[clearlyportals]

Ok, when you do set it up on another domain with a duplicate site, just make sure you set your robots.txt to something like:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

So that search engines don't try and index it by mistake!

You'll want to make sure that you setup 301 redirects so that your old pages are redirected to the new ones. This can be a pain, but my personal opinion is that your urls aren't currently optimised and this is best done early rather than later.

Give us a shout when you get round to doing it

[freeeasy]

ok- I've not a clue what the robots.txt is all about so that will be some more googling and research!!!- its a minefild but its a learning experinace.

Cheers for the help.