Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

Hello~  I`m in the process of offering something that currently has no direct competition.  A site on menopause with tons of information about signs & symptoms, alternative treatments,  leading to products from different vendors that are all geared for menopause or mature women.  Menopause itself, has just recently begun to be marketed and talked about on talk shows, magazines, etc,...... and many doctors still don`t get it.  So my purpose here is to educate... which leads to buy....in that order.  I`m still doing some editing, especially with products/photos.  Please let me know your feeling on the `natural` shots of photos....I wanted to go beyond the `white box` on most product shots.  Thanks for your input~ julie
www.menopausemayhem.com

It`s a nice start and though I am not your target audience (a 37-year old male), let me make a few comments / suggestions:

1) The home page has way too much text in the middle - People don`t read that much text especially not when they have not yet been engaged (or given a reason) to.  You need to do more visual marketing and make it easier to understand at first glance what the site is about.

2) I didn`t even notice the top bar navigation at first.  It is way too subtle and I think a lot of people will not notice that nav area at the top.

3) You should make the entire block of text clickable on the left side navigation and not just the initial action words.

4) I went to diet and saw that the middle part of the page in IE7 over expanded it`s boundaries and made the left side navigation too narrow.

5) and finally, and perhaps most importantly, I didn`t see anywhere for your users to communicate with each other.  These kinds of sites will work best when you give your users the ability to create a community and interact with one another.  You can send use your own one, send them off to facebook, use forums, or use something like Ning for a completely free and custom social network but if you to really make something happen, allow them to come together.

Hope you find that helpful.




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-jc

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JC Cameron, President
VendorCity, Inc. - Your source for highly recommended Vendors

http://www.VendorCity.com

JC`s View: My take on technology and entrepreneurship

I agree with everything JC said, above. The site is too "jumbled" at the moment. I can understand how having a hot idea leads to almost an overload of "wow, this would be cool to add!..." but keep in mind you have time. :-) You don`t have to get everything across about the entire concept, all on 1 page.

Funny as it may sound, why not go all the way back to the very basics---back to grade school---and put together an outline. What is it you want to say, in what order, and how will you say it. You can do the outline in whatever system feels most comfortable, from an electronic Word document, to using paper index cards.

Play with the outline, and hold your text to around 400 words for each content area. So in the outline, jot down the two main ideas you want to discuss on each card (don`t actually write the 400 words).

This outline will become the skeleton of a "site index." From there, you`ll have a better way to approach the pages, navigation, and overall structure of the site.

Thanks so much for your input!  I`ve reworked the HomePage and made some other corrections.  If you have the chance, please check it out again and tell me NOW what you think! 

I think the text should be a bit larger. Some of it is flat out tiny and impossible to read ( Viewed in Firefox ).

I agree about the nav bar; maybe move it to just below the header area, above the content. It is easily seen there, accessible, and pretty common, so many visitors will automatically look there for it.

"menamay" ..... ?  Maybe it`s because I`m a guy and this is basic female info, but theres nothing stating what it is that I can see.

Your meta tags ..... your description is empty, and your keywords ..... well .... I think you have a few hundred too many :) It`s like you are adding every single word that appears in your site into your keyword area. Trim it down to maybe the 10 most relevant; If your site is as niche/unique as you say, you don`t need so many, and they aren`t going to help as is. Many search engines don`t take them too seriously anymore, anyway.

Put titles in your links, and image sizes in your image tags.

Theres a lot of excess/unneeded/unused tags, like the font tags for your opening paragraph, as well as excessive spacer tags. Bloated/poor/unneeded code slows down your pages, can cause rendering issues, and will not validate ( if that`s important to you ). You`re using 2 external css files for styling, but have all kinds of code in your pages that should be in your css file, not added into your main file like it is.



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M Hall
Website Critique Community
International Society of Curmudgeons

I agree with above comments.  Also recommend moving the bottom material up to the top and paring down the wordy text into something that is easier on the eyes to read (bigger font, less text, not multicolored).

Let me know if I can help,