Review This Site

[leporello]

Jeez, I'll buy your template! Thats a sweet template imo. Site looks great, but as everyone else has said, the money you're asking for is way too much.

[CK]

PTC I know you asked me and you should have sent me a reminder ... I sometimes forget things (sorry) sooo I’m going to review it here. I haven’t read through everyone’s posts so if something I say is covered my apologies and I haven’t done one of these in ages...so don’t shoot me

Homepage - as a user...I don’t like the drop down menu. Not so much the drop down menu but the piece that flings down on me when I got to hit the home button. Since those pages are already linked to in the side bar there's really no reason to have them listed there again. It’s confusing when trying to hit home

You should be linking to your reviews within your table. You have the names of the poker rooms there and by instinct I want to click but I can’t. All the table does is push me to leave your site and quite possibly I’m not ready to go to the poker room yet. Maybe I want to see a review first

There is that info icon but to be honest unless I hovered over it, I wouldn’t have known what page it would take me to, or even if it would take me to a page. Most people won’t bother checking that.

all banners and icons should be linked to.. i.e. your aced logos you've made or any other room. I would also add some more CTA's to those areas..It’s kind of the opposite to the issue with the table. IN some areas I can read more content but I can’t actually go to the poker room unless I look for a link to click and I shouldn’t have to look.

You have a bonus page but other than content which most people don’t bother to read and a table there isn’t anything for me. The information there is basically for someone who’s new to poker. What are you doing for the people who've played a year or two? Besides the table which shows them the same information as the homepage, the user really doesn’t get much back. Yes they know they'll get a $600 bonus at FT, but really why is that bonus better or worse than the $600 bonus at RPM? Are they match offers or instant cash? When do they expire? and again maybe I want a review so I can check payment methods or what games are available etc... you need to get those links in there

Some of your internal pages provide plenty of information for someone looking for tournaments and whatnot except you’re lacking the CTA's. It’s the same problem as the top. Not everyone wants to read a review, and not everyone is ready to leave your site just yet. Besides the two big download and play buttons, there's nothing else available for me to go to that particular room. Your buttons do look nice, but the text is kind of mashed together. I would make them cleaner and easier to read.

I don’t like the two aced banners on the right bar. One should go. You have aced listed as best online poker site and featured site> your featured site should always be placed before any other site....hence being featured. There must be something super fabulous about the site to be a featured site right Move it up so it gets viewed more. The second aced banner is a waste of space. You don’t need to list them twice when you could use that space for another room or quite possibly just have two banners

I do think there is way too much going on, within your homepage. People don’t like to scroll and the majority of what you've got sitting at the bottom is probably getting lost in the shuffle. Why not have pages specifically targeting those topics, and use your homepage for two or three different keywords instead of multiple.

An awesome tool I think could benefit you is crazyegg or clicktail. Both provide heat maps, but if you were to choose either of those I would definitely go with clicktail BECAUSE they record your users so you can see what they are doing based on the mouse. 10:1 people aren’t scroll down even half of those pages. There isn’t anything at the top that says POW let’s play poker, and the bottom is more content than anything else. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying having a long page is bad cause good lord im awful for making super long pages BUT from top to bottom I don’t see anything that makes me want to grab my credit card and play poker. Get the clicktale when you can and it will definitely give you a better understanding of what your users are doing and more importantly - what your users aren’t doing. From there you can move your pages around a bit till you find a good medium.


I haven’t looked any further than that and I’m sorry ..just a bit tired today. Hopefully all of that made sense. I wouldn’t worry so much about not selling the site. Put some more time into it and baby it a bit. You never know, you may not want to sell it later on.

Good Luck

EDIT - Something else I spotted that was bugging me. It's obvious Aced is your main room but I wouldn't try to fool people into thinking they are the best for certain areas when they aren't. This isn't just Aced but the entire Merge network. An example is on your homepage you have Aced listed first above FT for Best Poker Sites for Cash Game Players. I think that entirely depends on what cash games those players are looking for and besides having super soft games, those on the Merge network kinda suck. There's still a lack of traffic and stakes are minimal at best during most hours of the day. So by listing them as the first choice of the two your saying that Aced outranks FT in the cash game department. Sure you may want to push that particular room, but what happens when the player downloads, deposits and finds out that unless its during peak hours, there are hardly any games running except for those in the small stakes. No where do you mention the lack of traffic or spread. Don't mistake that for saying Merge sucks and you shouldnt be sending players there. We all love Brandon and the rest of the guys and Merge has potential but I really think with some of these smaller sites you have to pick and choose how to promote them so you dont lose out on the process.

The point I'm trying to make is this. The player gets to the site and realizes that the traffic lacks and decides not to play. Which affiliate site do you think they wont return to when it comes to advise. Push the rooms but make sure your specific on their faults to, as this could deter players from ever visiting your site again.

[Unknown Webmaster]

Edit: Kaus has some really good advice above - Looking into ClickTail is a very, very good idea. Their recordings of the visitors on my sites has really helped me get a better understanding of how "normal people" browse websites, and as a result improve my design and articles to increase conversions. Even though the free version will only let you track a very limited amount of visitors, I think it is definitely worth installing.

As I understand it, you don't use Google Analytics or any other advanced visitor tracking program (please correct me I'm wrong).

I think the best thing you can do is to start using Google Analytics and look very closely at which keywords you are getting visitors for and what pages those people are sent to. Then experiment with those pages and add calls to action for things that are closely related to what the visitors that hit those pages are looking for - They may not be looking to sign up a poker room.

I would love to make some detailed suggestions about what you could change, but I'm afraid that most of what I would come up with would be irrelevant to you, since I don't know enough about your site.

Maybe you could get someone to look over your visitor data and give you some suggestions based on them - I wouldn't mind spending a couple of hours doing this, but I wouldn't expect you to share that kind of data with someone you don't know