Site Help Been reviewed but needing ideas

Well seems as some like and some dislike Echo-Of-Thunder we have a few members, which is nice. and PLEASE do not think this is spam to get ppl to join, IT'S NOT!
What I am curious to know is how I can inprove the site to get more members. I had been thinking of maybe adding a radio station of my own. I know Bandwith. There is a chat, which nobody uses.

I know some do not like or really understand weather. Maybe that is the problem I dont know.
I have spent a lot of my time on this site, and really would like it to be one of the better weather sites on the net.

Do any of you have any ideas of how to get it rolling? I really would love some imput on it.
If not I kind of doubt that EOT will be around next Hurricane season.

Thanks
Echo

Well firstly there are some really nasty display issues with FF3 on a 1280X800 screen.The title is way off and the frames really mess things up. My advice is to either drop the frames and use another method to have static links (such as PHP or a content management system) Or configure the frames to hide the scroll bars (you might need to reduce the length of the content because the scrolls are really horrible) or use CSS to colour the scroll bars to fit in with the rest of the site. Also the background image, it looks about 1990's most websites these days have a very simple pattern on plain coloured background and i would recommend possibly using the background of the forum (the black/grey dotty one) or a plain black background.Im also not sure why the forum is in a weird frame like that. It would be better just to have two columns made in frames. The left for the navigation and the right for the content and have the frames go from the top to the botom and not cut off half way down.Anyway, good luck!

Well, Here are a few suggestions:To make the site beter, and make sure people come back. - Dont use frames, instead use <div>s, possitioned by CSS, as frames are quite incompatible with some browsers. - I found your navigation bar very annoying, make things more somple, have say, five catagories, containing sub-catagories, thhis makes it easier to find what you want, without reading the entire thing, most people wont want to read the whole thing. - Also, put in some controls for the sound, many people get annoyed by the sound, maybe have a link at the top of the page to turn the sound on/off. I noticed you are using a plugin which is larger than needed, you are using a video plugin, you should change the attributes to make it beter for playing audio, so that there will be no visual stuff in the player, this way, you can put it at the top, as many people wont think to look at the bottom to turn off the sound! - It apears you are using an iframe for the homepage, inside your frameset, this looks bad, as the scrolbar doesnt fit the sites theme, as well as frames are bad as i said above, atleast get rid of the scrollbar an border on the iframe.To make the site more popular, make sure you have good META tags in your code, and submit it to lots of search engines.

Frames are a big no-no. You can easily achieve what you want using CSS, and either some PHP or SSI. Getting rid of the frames will make the page more accessible to users, especially those with disabilities, and of course to the search engines.

 

Looking at the navigation on the left hand side there are a few isses. First: the scroll bars. They serve no purpose (the vertical one is visible, but disabled) and they make navigation difficult; people shouldn't have to (and won't) scroll to see the main navigation for your site. The longer links are also getting cut off to make way for the vertical scroll bar. These issues can be solved by getting rid of the frames and using CSS instead to control your page layout. Lastly, the links are not separated enough. At a quick glance, it is difficult to tell where one link ends, and another begins.

 

The background image for the whole site was not a good choice. It doesn't tile correctly (ie. the edges don't match up) so there are clear lines visible where the image gets repeated. It is also too distracting to be a good background image. Also: the background audio. Never start sound without the user's permission! To make this problem worse, the media player is "below the fold" (you have to scroll to see it). This will only lead to annoying the vast majority of visitors. By all means have the audio player on the site, but it should be up to the user to click Play, not to click Stop.

 

Moving to the main part of the page, the first thing that hit me was that the forum doesn't line up with anything, and doesn't match the site design. As the forum is the main emphasis of your site, I would perhaps suggest doing what Xisto does. Lose the side navigation menu completely, and just use the forum. You can add those links into the forum template. That would also solve the issue with the background image, and generally give the site a more polished feel. Also, the forum being hosted on Free-Boards gives you very little control over it. You can easily set your own forum up on Xisto, allowing you to do exactly what you want to with it.

 

Lastly - the main reason people aren't visiting your site: they can't find it. Using frames makes it very hard for search engines to crawl your site, work out what it does, what the legitimate content is, etc. Also, nowhere do you describe what your site actually does. Search engines use introductory paragraphs etc. to work out what your site provides to visitors, and at the moment you don't have that.

 

I'm sorry to be so critical, but it's my honest opinion of your site, and where I think your problems with it lie.

Have you tried increasing your resolution?

 

This is what it looks like (scaled down) on my computer:

(for anyone interested, it's a WUXGA.. that's 1920x1200)

 

Review in one sentence:

The background tiling looks pretty bad, the background of the main frame and sidebar doesn't go well, the header bar doesn't look like it fits, the music is plain annoying and shouldn't be played automatically, the scrollbar on the sidebar doesn't need to be there, the frame with the forums is pretty out of place, and not centered.. isn't the plural of echo 'echoes'?

I think you have tried to include too much.I often do things like this. it looks like you have tried to cram in, as much as you can, to make the site powerful, informative, and easy to use. but most of the time. its goes wrong, stick with something simple.Look at the google homepage for example, a picture, on a white background, yet still the most popular search engine ever made.The truth is, that your average user, probably wont even notice the effort you have put into making everything look nice, and having extra features for making thing work well.You really want a non frames page, with a simple abackground, a few links at the top or the side, a search bar, and a nice, quick, not-flooded-with-text homepage.

hey... first of all ur template is not very good. people like very clean designs. and personally, i dont like much dark templates. dont know about others. second many links are overlapping other links in the left navigation panel. check it.if you need pots then if you have a good budget then goto http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ and get some posters.. its one of the best sites u can find for this purpose.

Well seems as some like and some dislike Echo-Of-Thunder we have a few members, which is nice. and PLEASE do not think this is spam to get ppl to join, IT'S NOT! What I am curious to know is how I can inprove the site to get more members. I had been thinking of maybe adding a radio station of my own. I know Bandwith. There is a chat, which nobody uses.

I know some do not like or really understand weather. Maybe that is the problem I dont know.
I have spent a lot of my time on this site, and really would like it to be one of the better weather sites on the net.

Do any of you have any ideas of how to get it rolling? I really would love some imput on it.
If not I kind of doubt that EOT will be around next Hurricane season.

Thanks
Echo

You may add some socialising zone, or freebies to attract more people to your site. Moreover you may add more videos related to your topics it will also be helping in your target. As I said before you should convert the look to a catchy one mainly the colour. Rest everything is cool out there in your site.