Please review my first site - checkraise.com.au

[checkraise]

Hi All

Looking for some honest opinions from fellow poker affiliates. This is my first website and it's still in the first few weeks of operation.

Please let me know what you think, I'm prepared for criticism!

Check Raise

Cheers
Richard

[CK]

I'll give it a go

1 - your page is way to wide. I have a wide monitor and it looks incredibly huge. If you can, I would reduce it although not sure as it looks like your using phpbb

2 - Title tags are the same on every page. Your title tags should be unique and in a few words explain what the page is about

3 - I find the homepage to be a bit unorganized. You have a bunch of posts but there really isn't any direction. I'm not quite sure what your site is about - yes I know poker - but what about poker. I see your running freerolls. imho freerolls are dated unless your RTR or PL who can shell out 20K to a select group. Like 95% of affiliates who start their first sites trying to grab at the freeroll players don't make any money. If you search you'll likely find some posts in the main forum where affiliate have said I wish I didnt waste so much time on the "free" stuff. Yes you may sign a new player here or there but the players who join just want the free cash. It looks like you had 90 people involved in one of your games. Of those 90 how many were new depositing players? I personally think freerollers are broke and this is a way for them to grab a bit of cash without having to deposit and donate to the table.

4 - Your forum has way to many boards for a new forum. Poker Affiliate Bible – The #1 Free Poker Affiliate Guide has some great articles on creating a forum. I would def read them. For example your Forum competitons - I dont know when you opened that forum but if it's been longer than a month and there are no posts in it - close it. It makes your forum look dead. That whole tournament section could be combined into one so it doesn't look so bare.

Those are a few things I spotted right away. I think you need to focus in more with your pages. Right now it's a bit scattered as to where your going with them. Anyway hopefully you didnt take that the wrong way and others will chime in

Its a good start - just need more focus and organization.

[checkraise]

Thanks, this is exactly the sort of thing I'm looking for Kaus.

On the page width, it's fluid, so it should expand to suit your resolution I assume. I've never seen the site on a wider than usual monitor so it might look weird?

The forum was actually worse than that! I went through just yesterday merged some boards together, got rid of a couple of forums, etc. I'll have a look at the site link you provided for some more direction on the forum but it's becoming apparent that I need to condense it quite a bit.

re: point 3: I'm a couple of weeks in but already I'm starting to agree. The main aim of running the freerolls was to attract an initial member base, then branch out into tournament leagues that are buy-in only. Running these freerolls is a pain in the ar$e already

Re: Title Tags - hadn't even thought of it! I've got a lot to learn and as I mentioned this is my first site. I'm sure this will be a pretty easy fix. I'll get onto sorting this out straight away.

Re: Site focus - This is the big issue I've had in the back of my mind. At the moment the site probably is too vague and general. If anyone has any ideas on better ways to organise the homepage I'm all ears!

Thanks again Kaus