Would appreciate Reviews for my fitness site

[Aboudie]

Hi.

I've been working on this site for a good two months now. I've had the domain for a longer period of time but unfortunately lazed off, but now i have finally put out some work on it.

www.simplewaystogetfit.com

Something that i personally think needs work on is the header. I have to admit though, a good number of people have told me to keep it as simple as possible and that current header looks fine, but i dont know something about it seems off..

Some futures that i will b have adding soon is a forum, but will most likely have it in a month or two once i get enough traffic. Any IM experts advice me on this one? I was told it's better to have it off for now..publish it when everything is polished and so on.

[Greg Baka]

Hello Aboudie,

Here are the thing I noticed:

1) I use the NoScript program to protect my computer. When I first clicked the link to your page, nothing really displayed. Is your whole site dependent of JavaScript? If so, you will lose a lot of new viewers that don't want to trust (allow JS) on a virtually blank page. You need to fix it so at least the basic header and images and text show up when JS is blocked...

2) Meta Tags: You only have a title. You should add a description to each page.

3) Appearance: The design is clean and normal. Everything is in the common locations. Consider adding a Contact link - being able to contact the management instills a lot of trust...

4) Who is it for? Men or women or both? Young or old or both? The pink header gives the impression that it is for women. You should spell it out for your viewers - use the proper words (men, women, young, old, etc) way up top in the header. Consider a more neutral header color if for both sexes.

5) Text and images in the body: They are too close. Put a little margin or padding between the right side of the images and the left side of the text. Consider putting rounded corners on your images - it makes the appearance a little more professional.

6) Purpose? Is the purpose of your site to sell the Amazon items shown over in the right columns of your pages? From what I've read about online marketing, people tend to ignore whatever it is in the right hand columns because they consider it the "advertising space". Consider flipping the columns so the Amazon items are on the left, or stack them in with the articles...especially if you can make them appear to be part of an article, like a review of the book being sold

Good luck!

Greg

[Aboudie]

Hello Aboudie,

Here are the thing I noticed:

1) I use the NoScript program to protect my computer. When I first clicked the link to your page, nothing really displayed. Is your whole site dependent of JavaScript? If so, you will lose a lot of new viewers that don't want to trust (allow JS) on a virtually blank page. You need to fix it so at least the basic header and images and text show up when JS is blocked...

2) Meta Tags: You only have a title. You should add a description to each page.

3) Appearance: The design is clean and normal. Everything is in the common locations. Consider adding a Contact link - being able to contact the management instills a lot of trust...

4) Who is it for? Men or women or both? Young or old or both? The pink header gives the impression that it is for women. You should spell it out for your viewers - use the proper words (men, women, young, old, etc) way up top in the header. Consider a more neutral header color if for both sexes.

5) Text and images in the body: They are too close. Put a little margin or padding between the right side of the images and the left side of the text. Consider putting rounded corners on your images - it makes the appearance a little more professional.

6) Purpose? Is the purpose of your site to sell the Amazon items shown over in the right columns of your pages? From what I've read about online marketing, people tend to ignore whatever it is in the right hand columns because they consider it the "advertising space". Consider flipping the columns so the Amazon items are on the left, or stack them in with the articles...especially if you can make them appear to be part of an article, like a review of the book being sold

Good luck!

Greg

Great Review Greg.

1.How popular is the use of noscript programs? My theme is indeed javascirpt heavy, but i purchased the theme because of it's functionality.

2.Thanks for reminding me about meta tags that should help me out with SEO. I'll have to find this one on wordpress because post is the only place where i was able to add tags. I'm sure it's just a simple thing that i am missing out.

3. I have a contact link on my footer but since you did not notice it, i imagine footer is not the best place for it.

4. I have to admit when i started the site, i really did not have a laser pointed niche. I know i wanted to get into fitness and that was it..I'm surprised you see a pink header. My main header background is set to grey, if you mean the thin line border, i acutally changed it to blue and i saw the same thing with different computers. Maybe this has something to do with using noscript?

5. Yes, I should probably put rounded corners and should fix the margin between tittles and images.

6. Good idea. I have a few amazon products advertised on my articles. My clickbank products fits well with the pages and the content but i guess i have to figure out a place for my amazon links.

[exoLink.blogspot]

what about contact us on top page with "Not a member yet?" sentence?

[Aboudie]

what about contact us on top page with "Not a member yet?" sentence?

Hi exo

It's a work in progress. But those are minor issues that i'm trying to brush up and complete.

[Noppy]

looks pretty good to me so far.

a couple of design ideas perhaps you might like to try. For the header if you had a bit of the blue checkered like on the footer to tie the 2 together. And also if you make the background strip either higher or lower than the same colour part of the centre page, if you get what i mean. maybe the back strip 50px's lower so the main part of the page looks like it cuts into the strip. I think it makes the page pop out a little then, seen it on a few websites and can work well.


hth's

[petervasilev]

Nice and simple I would say. You can do a better design but I guess it will do for now.

[loginman]

yeah absolutely your design is really beautiful.you have been done a great job! keep on and good luck

[WebsiteWriter]

Hi.

I've been working on this site for a good two months now. I've had the domain for a longer period of time but unfortunately lazed off, but now i have finally put out some work on it.

www.simplewaystogetfit.com

Something that i personally think needs work on is the header. I have to admit though, a good number of people have told me to keep it as simple as possible and that current header looks fine, but i dont know something about it seems off..

Some futures that i will b have adding soon is a forum, but will most likely have it in a month or two once i get enough traffic. Any IM experts advice me on this one? I was told it's better to have it off for now..publish it when everything is polished and so on.

I like how simple and clean your site design is. In my opinion you are seriously wasting your prime real estate though. You could make much better use of your header and navigation at the top.

You don't really grab me with an interesting tagline, offer, or any real reason to keep visiting your website and yet I love fitness ideas and websites. I spend a lot of time reading through forum posts about fitness.

I would like to seen an interesting offer. Or some reason why I should care about your website.

You need to give your visitors a reason to come back for more.

I just don't see why I would.

Hope that helps.

[Aboudie]

I like how simple and clean your site design is. In my opinion you are seriously wasting your prime real estate though. You could make much better use of your header and navigation at the top.

You don't really grab me with an interesting tagline, offer, or any real reason to keep visiting your website and yet I love fitness ideas and websites. I spend a lot of time reading through forum posts about fitness.

I would like to seen an interesting offer. Or some reason why I should care about your website.

You need to give your visitors a reason to come back for more.

I just don't see why I would.

Hope that helps.

Excuse my newbie question, but what do you mean by prime real estate?

I was actually planning on providing free e-books and free recipes with e-marketing. Which you will see on the aweber form..I guess i should try to put that in the header to grab their attention.

[WebsiteWriter]

I mean the most important space on your website. In this case, the header, the part of the website before the reader has to scroll down the page. In some cases that is the only thing your new website visitor will see when they visit your website.

You don't have that much time to get their attention.

You want to give them a reason to stay.

Or entice them to dig in.

[hoog]

Hi,

The quality of the logo seems to be not that good. Also i don't think much seo has been done on it as alot of meta data is missing along with Alt tags for the images

[dubaidhow]

Such a nice site with simple and clean design,

[woolabee]

I liked the design, but felt that it was missing something up top. Instead of a logo, I think a header with
image would make people relate to it faster.

[PicnicTutorials]

I like it. It's clean and to the point. The only thing I would say needs a looking at is the footer on the ipad (at least). The blue different color slivers of blue on the sides of the footer look out of place. That's all

[josh mcq]

The overall layout seems decent, conforms to basic conventions.
I would modify your tagline to be a little more descriptive about what the site is, such as "Your go-to site for fitness & health articles" or something like that. As it it, it made me think there is some other service being provided not readily apparent. Is your main intent to sell ad space? I would try to promote more traffic with some simple "share buttons" which you could easily find a wordpress widget to do. The articles are valuable, so it makes sense to let your users promote the articles they like and thus your site for you. There is currently a category widget, but it seems to pretty much mirror the menu in the header, so it seems unnecessary.
heI don't like the widget

[shifna]

The overall layout is OK. But I don't like the Search box.. font style and color

[Whaleriders6]

Nice site, that is easy to navigate, and interesting articles! I would agree with other posters, in that you could add a nice header in, instead of having a large white space at the top. You have a big advertising area there to take advantage of! One grammatical error I noticed right off the bat...under the 20 reasons to drink green tea article it says, "Green Tea Consumption can help you burn 35 calories in just 12 hours day." You could revise that to say "in just 12 hours a day" or "in just 12 hours". Anyway, interesting and informative site.

[boneyp]

My Advice is more in terms of SEO and Marketing. You have good blogs/article on your site. What you need is to promote the articles so that it reaches a wider audience and get better search results. You have a low PR considering your site is now. The URL structure of your individual blog is not SEO friendly. All the articles should be directly under root folder. Try to make that change, you will see a improvement in your rankings

[scott graham]

Really like the simplicity of the website, I would add success stories and possible a facebook wall. but really nice website

[mathewclarke]

Such a good site simple and clean design

[davidjwest]

Overall it's pretty good but the layout goes wrong on the "working out" page, at least it does on Chrome. The column on the left overlaps the middle column.

According to the W3C Validator there are 33 errors on your homepage, fix these if you can.

Nice start though.

[webcosmo]

Nice looking site, not very fond though on the colors of the logo and the footer background.

[BillO]

No document type declaration (DTD). For some reason the Validator does not pick that up. Not required with HTML5? Maybe somebody could explain that to me. Anyway, it doesn't validate. There are 33 errors in the HTML.

Took a long time to load, but I'm on dial-up, so I wouldn't be too concerned about that.

Is this another pre-made tmeplate? The code is a mess (when viewing the source). For some reason the pre-made templates are like that. I've been playing with Joomla! and that's what I find with those templates.

You could use a background, and a distinct header, but what you have is okay if that's what you want. I prefer a body background and a distinct header, but that's just me.

When I click on a menu item, it goes back to gray. It would be nice to have a different color (or shade of gray) showing what page one is viewing (or provide "breadcrumbs").

Otherwise, not bad.

[BillO]

I like how simple and clean your site design is. In my opinion you are seriously wasting your prime real estate though. You could make much better use of your header and navigation at the top.

You don't really grab me with an interesting tagline, offer, or any real reason to keep visiting your website and yet I love fitness ideas and websites. I spend a lot of time reading through forum posts about fitness.

I would like to seen an interesting offer. Or some reason why I should care about your website.

You need to give your visitors a reason to come back for more.

I just don't see why I would.

Hope that helps.

There is a "tagline", but I notice the lack of capitalization, and that bothers me. Should be "Workout routines ... "

I mentioned that I prefer a more distinct header. But it isn't necessary to use every square centimeter of space. White space is good. Clutter is bad.

The content offered is the reason to come back. The design is "eye candy," and that is necessary for an attractive site. Certainly an ugly site is going to be a turn off. I'm less likely to visit an ugly site unless I really, really like what I'm reading (something educational). If your trying to sell something, the site better be impressive. The look of the Website says something about the company.