Site Review

[Lori]

I'm a newbie... this is "Day 3" for me. Could you please take a look at what I have so far and please make any suggestions/recommendations that would make the site better?

Thanks!
Lori
www.SuperAffiliateCaseStudy.com

[Jim Hutchinson]

Hello Lori

Welcome to the forum! The first thing I noticed is your site title is at the very top, leaving a large empty space in the header graphic. I would edit the style sheet so the site title is inside the header graphic. That will also help move the other content up.

Looking closer, you may have to edit header.php to move things around. "masthead", "header_img" can be combined and the navigation links, "nav" can go below that.

Remember, that is the first thing your visitors (and search engines) will see.

Next I would limit the number of posts per page to 5 if they are short and make a static page for the entry page. That will welcome your guests and introduce them to your site. Give them an overview of what they can learn there.

The rest of the page looks good.

[Lori]

Thanks Jim! I'll see what I can do about the top of the page. I used the Cutline Theme and have made a few little modifications already but it definitely needs more work. I'm working on the next site to be used in the case study and will submit that one for review as well. I used a different theme but ended up changing that one quite a bit as well. Thanks for your inputs!

[GailT]

The other option is to use another header graphic that would span the page.

Are you interested in developing a list of people who come to the blog and watch your progress? You could add an optin box for those who don't want to use RSS and get your updates via email.

I hate to overload you at this new stage of your marketing but you may find some help and information at the ThirtyDayChallenge with Ed Dale. The cool thing is that this year (he does it annually and it's free) the videos have pdf files that can be downloaded and saved.

The education is all done online using video and now the video is backed up with pdf. I find that reading goes faster and I'm less likely to be bored than watching video - and you can keep the pdf on your hard drive.

He usually has some good stuff and this year has a keyword tool that he is offering free for the 30 day challenge but then the trial time will end and it will be a paid service. Nice way to test drive it!

Gail

[Lori]

Hi Gail,

Thanks for passing along the info for ThirtyDayChallenge.com. I registered and have lots of reading to do! I've been working on my second site (www.FloridaBeachReviews.com) and will be using that one for the 'case study' and see where it goes.

I like your idea about changing the header. I'm running into a similar issue with the second site and need to make a decision. I don't want the image to be too large because it'll add to the load time for the page but I think I can come up with something to either span the width of the page or get pretty close.

Thanks for your suggestion!
Lori

[GailT]

Jim's suggestion would be great but I know how I was in the beginning with code and trying to figure out which end was up. I thought that getting an image with a lower resolution to make the load time shorter and bigger to span the page would just be easier!

I love the guys from Thirty Day Challenge. If you're up for more free classes Sam Clark and Jack Humphrey will be running another 16 Step class schedule in September or so. They are great - but live. You have to show up and really be listening for about an hour twice a week for 8 weeks.

Best of luck!

Gail

[Lowell Rieger]

In firefox2 your 2 web hosting mini banners leak into the first post. You probably want those in a sidebar widget instead?

Lowell