Hi guys, looking forward to browsing this site for hints and tips and although my site doesn't deal particularly with design as such I have attempted to refine and design the various parts of it to be more user friendly. My concern is that although I am receiving a lot of traffic after a lot of SEO pain and attention to detail I can't help feeling that I'm loosing half my traffic within around 10 seconds.

 

Can anyone offer their own views on my site as I've tweaked, replaced and moved content to where I think it's optimum although I need fresh eye's on the matter.

 

ANY comments or critisism's will be listened to and greatly appreciated.

 

http://www.freewarebb.com

 

many Thanks

marko

I'm afraid I just get: www.freewarebb.com could not be found. Please check the name and try again.

Immediate first impression is busy.

 

Make more emphasis on the search and categories so the user can quickly find what they need to find the software they are looking for.

 

Secondly on the actual program page the download button should be a bit more in your face. Possibly add another button at the top of the page, at the moment you have to scroll down to download and some people won't scroll down.

Like the design but as the guy above said... its very busy for a home page i think.

plus the text is a bit hard to read.

Pendulum, I'm browsing from another ISP and can't get onto the site either - contacting the host just now.

Thanks for the feedback guys, please keep it coming as I am intending on redesigning the site accordingly so any hints greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Marko

Changed the front portal to show our categories and to be honest I think it's a tad more appealing straight-away so thanks for the suggestion jamest - I'm also playing with the download button on the file downloads themselves .

 

Next step is to try my hand at tweaking to a different font although I realise this obviously depends on the various OS browsing the site as the font comes from the PC and not the site.

 

As for the site not being available to all, I think it's still a DNS matter for individual ISP's in which case anyone having issue's could try "ipconfig/flushdns" and "ipconfig/registerdns" from the command prompt.

 

Thanks to all so far.

Marko

Looks a lot better. I personally think the font is fine, although you may want to add a bit of padding to all the cat links, maybe 1 or 2px just to seperate them a little bit.

 

But now immediately if the user comes in on the homepage they should be able to find what they want relatively easily.

thanks again for the comments jamest, added a tad more space between the cats but still can't help being worried about the amount of traffic I seem to be loosing for some reason. I have far more new visitors than returning ones and my stats tell me the new visitors are leaving quicker than the returning ones. Is it me, or is this just the nature of the beast or is there something fundamentally wrong with my site to make people leave quickly?!

 

I've even analyzed keyword relevancy and most keywords that drive traffic to my site are indeed relevant!. The only other change I'm reverting it to allow guest's unlimited downloads as before I had to limit this to 5 because I was noticing a major increase in downloads on select files which didn't make sense but it seems certain guest's were flooding the download count (possibly not intentially but maybe due to some kind of download manager,etc) which knocked the stats way off (i.e. only 10 views the file but 3000 have downloaded it - that kind of thing) - anyway I'm going to allow guest's unlimited downloads as I'm concerned this may have driven people away so finger crossed!

Cheers

Marko