Can I get some ideas for improving my personal website?

yetieater

yetieater

Weaksauce
Joined
Jul 13, 2005
Messages
118
Hi guys

I've been writing on my wordpress blog for the past couple of years. It's my little playground, so the content tends to range as wide as my interests do

I'd like to make my website better. I can leverage Google Analytics to help put some data behind my decision-making, but I'm reaching out to anyone who has a moment for ideas and suggestions on improvements

My site URL is http://alex.zheng-dynasty.com

Right now it's a basic recolor of the Wordpress Twenty Fourteen theme

Please let me know what actions I can take, and I'll add them to my next actions

Thanks in advance
 
Depends on what "better" means to you. To me, content is more important than design. It's pretty easy to make a website that's visibly appealing and usable; but even a perfectly designed site is worthless if it doesn't provide something useful.
 
It's slow as hell to navigate. Get a better hosting solution or leverage CloudFlare.

Also, the color scheme is super bland. I need something more.
 
Right now, at least one of the menu's are too long to fit in a 1920x1080 resolution so you can't even click on some of the menu options. I'd say that you should condense the menus to make the choices more generic, and allow drill downs from there.

I also don't like side bars you have to scroll through for tags, etc. Tag searching should be a menu option that brings up the tags from there.

But I'm a old fashioned.

Basically there is just too many options/menu options from the main page. Simplify the home page.
 
I'm not sure how using a sub-domain (or not) would improve the site. Can you elaborate, Amazone?

Meanwhile, It's been almost a month -- looks like yetieater has abandoned the thread. Happens all the time: people request help, then don't come back after they get it.
 
Sorry guys, I hate to be that guy. I've been mulling the purpose of the site...

Initially I just wanted to share the petroleum engineering notes that I'd taken throughout college, and to blog a little. I wrote an article about adding bluetooth to old receivers, which got me thinking more along the lines of posting product reviews. Those have been the largest drivers of traffic to the site. I get a little bit of affiliate revenue, which I could afford to turn around into a better hosting solution. It takes forever to respond right now (almost as bad as me!). If Cloudflare doesn't boost load times considerably, it may be time to abandon Dreamhost.

Now it would be great to optimize my conversion rate on existing visitors, though I am not too concerned with this right now. Design has also taken a backseat for a long time, and I'm curious as to your suggestions on scaling down the present mess of menus for something more user-friendly.

mikeblas, if you drop back in, do you remember what Amazone's comment was? I must have missed it.
 
Oh, interesting; he must've deleted it. (But I thought that left a tombstone?) He said something about being shocked that you had used a subdomain. I'm not sure how that's relevant to any measure of success.

If you're not sure what your goals are for the site, then I don't think anyone can help you -- not even yourself, since you don't know what you're after. Making the site load faster is an improvement, but to what end?
 
I see. Ultimately I want it to just be a good personal website. One that engages the audience, and encourages them to dig around a bit, no matter how they ended up there. And it would be cool to monetize it in a non-spam fashion, something that people feel good about. I tried to do this to some end by writing product reviews, but there are much better things that I could do. Just need to know what..
 
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