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Hi Everybody,
As of late, my search engine rankings have dramatically improved and I’m starting to getting more people visiting via these search engines. However, while people are visiting my poker review pages, I’m not getting many click thrus.
I was wondering if there may be a design flaw or any suggestions anybody has as to the placement of banners and text links? A good example of my typical poker review page can be found on http://www.poker-reviews.net/party-poker-review.htm.Thanks in Advance,
Kevin
Here is my 2 cents… When I pull up a review page, I see a lot of banners and no content unless I scroll down.
I would put the content up (with links within) and move the banners to the side or below.
kw
Every time you mention the name of a poker room – make it clickable.
kwblue wrote:Here is my 2 cents… When I pull up a review page, I see a lot of banners and no content unless I scroll down.I would put the content up (with links within) and move the banners to the side or below.
kw
I concur with kwblue – you need to make the process easier for the User – links and banners clearly stating “Click here to goto Party (Paradise)” etc will help – maybe include one at the end of each section.
Also, the layout seems unprofessional in my opinion. The text is obviosly great as far as engines are concerned, so make it slightly more professional and you’ll probably see conversions go thru the roof.
Stephen
Use absolute links instead of relative links.
Move the screenshots of the poker rooms to after the first paragraph or two of content.
I’d go with a different font than the cursive script looking font you’re using now.
I would center the links in your navbar on the left. Or make them a bulleted list. Or add some buffer space betwen the edge of the table and the text.
I would go for more personal and unique content in the reviews. Right now there’s a big focus on the features of the cardrooms like the games offered, the limits, and the bonuses, but all that information is available anywhere else. The real value on the site lies in your unique insights into the poker rooms–stuff like the drawbacks of each site is original an unavailable anywhere else.
I think 3 banners on each page should be plenty–one on top, one in the footer, and one in the left navbar.
You do need to make some of the names of the poker rooms clickable links to your affiliate code, but I wouldn’t necessarily make all of them affiliate links.
I’d make the page background a different color from the table background.
Hope that helps–it’s a great site.
While this topic is going, any of the experts want to share an average CTR that you receive on your sites?
My average for the month is 3.5% on about 89000 banner impressions. Individual banners range from .47% to about 14%.
Anyone else want to share or at least comment on my numbers?
Thanks so much for your input!
In response to Stephen (Paradise), you mentioned that the layout seems “unprofessional.” Would you mind elaborating a bit? I’m completely open to consturctive criticism.
And Randy,
I wanted to thank you for taking the time to thoroughly examine my site and propose specific recommendations. Your feedback is invaluable.
-Kevin-
Kevin-
I’m glad to be able to help if I can. :hattip:
Kevin1980 wrote:Thanks so much for your input!In response to Stephen (Paradise), you mentioned that the layout seems “unprofessional.” Would you mind elaborating a bit? I’m completely open to consturctive criticism.
-Kevin-
Hi Kevin
I think Randy expressed it better than me – the font needs changing, as well as the colour schemes… You are trying to convince the people to trust you, so include clear headers, and make it easy to read.
I am probably the worst web-designed in the world – I have no abilities, I just got the feeling based on looking at the site.
Hope this helps (a little).
Stephen
I agree with Randy’s idea of adding a buffer between the text and the border around the table cells.
Here are a few ideas to improve your tables:
In the source code for your home page, you have specified the table height. It says: height=”5426″.
This really isn’t necessary. You can delete that part, and then you won’t have all that blank space at the bottom of the page. It would look more professional without the blank space, I think.
Also, you can delete height=”699″ from the poker review pages — this doesn’t do anything useful. The height specification does not “limit” the height of the table — it sets this height as the minimum height. So, if you have more content than what will fit in a table that is 699 units tall, the table will simply stretch vertically to fit all the content inside. On the other hand, if you have very little content (say 2 or 3 lines of text), the table will still be 699 units tall, and you will have a bunch of blank space underneath the text. So, I would remove all instances of height=”something” from your code.
About cellpadding and cellspacing — You should play around with each of these and see what happens to the appearance of the site. You have one table nested inside another, so you should experiment with the cellspacing and cellpadding of both tables. By increasing the value from cellpadding=”0″ to say, 5 or 10, you will be able to create margins between the text and the edge of the table. This will make it look more professional.
I don’t know how knowledgeable you are with HTML and such, but I saw something in the code that didn’t make much sense to me:
[HTML]
[/HTML]
There was that, and there were some other spots where you had a lot of nested DIVs that didn’t seem to be useful. I don’t know what to recommend here, except to suggest that you take some time and learn more about HTML.I am a strong supporter of CSS (cascading style sheets) also, and I would suggest that you teach yourself a bit about that too. CSS can be extremely useful. It makes updating a site’s appearance very easy — you only edit one file, and the whole site is updated.
I think it is definitely worth the time to learn it if you can. You will thank yourself a hundred times over. Once you know how to use it, you’ll wonder how you ever lived without it.I like the colors you have chosen for your site — the green background and the white text work well together, and the yellow headers look nice.
I hope this helps!
OK, everything has been updated.
Index page: http://www.poker-reviews.net
Example of a poker review page: http://www.poker-reviews.net/party-poker-review.htmMy three remaining comments are:
1) I changed the color scheme to be a grey background with a green table. The choice was essentially grey or black. Does this color choice work, in your opinion?
2) I rearranged the banners. I think the banner on the left navigation bar looks good, but I’m still wondering about the top banner.
3) I re-did the left navigation bar. I’m still not completely happy with it but I think it might pass for now. Thoughts?
Also, thanks for bringing the HTML issues to my attention, Engineer. I changed the table heights to zero and I deleted the weird excess “DIVS.”
-Kevin-
