Help With My Site - help with my weather site

Okay here is the problem. My Site in general. Yes I already know it has a few coding problems, but that is not the real problem. the problem is I feel as I am not getting the hits I should get, or members joing the forum. I have submitted to ever place that I can over the past year. Told all my friends about it. Even and its bad but spammed it in yahoo chats, and nothing. I really like the site and the weather. I really wish that I knew what I could do here. I have even gone as far as looking into a dot com name, but really do not think that spending money is the real answer to this right now. if any of you have any idea's of what to do. please let me know.

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You need to put links to it all over the place.
Telling people isn't enough. To get good search rankings, you need lots of sites linking to you.
As search engines rank sites with lots of links pointing at them higher.

If you have any friends who own websites, get them to put a link to your site on, in return for you linking to them, it doesnt have to be a big bold link, just in the code.

There are sites where you can post links, for that purpose.

Things like putting your site in your forum signatures is good. Basically, put it all over the web.

But don't spam it, search engines will rank sites lower if they have hundreds of links to them on one page etc.
Just put it wherever you think it is necessary, but not too much, and you wont be ranked down for it.

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The main way to spread word about your forum is probably affiliation. Join forums , post and advertise your website without sounding desperate. It takes a while , but it will eventually bear results. Also , submit your site to as many search engines as possible , so there's more chance of people finding them. A new way is to also include little buttons which promote your site on social web networking sites like Stumbleupon , Reddit and Digg. Also , when you join forums , ask members of those forums to advertise your site in their signature and so on. It can prove succesful , and you've got nothing to lose really.

Hope I helped

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Ok there is a whole list of things you could do to improve your sites popularity.

One of course is improving your popularity on Google and any other search engines but not by spamming it because no one likes spammers. You could find a SEO engine to rank your site higher. Also that .com domain idea is great, people much rather clean links then sub domains or whatever something they can remember. That would also improve the 'SEO' of it as well. Then you could totally revamp the site with new design/layout and upgrade the forum this gets the members excited and they might tell some other people to join and so on.

But of course getting your site popular is pain in the behind. Very hard but if you get it right it can be very rewarding!

I hope I helped..

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Telling your friends or family friends is not much of help.
I went through your site, and found the layout very clumsy and un impressive. The forum in the middle is cramped for space. you feel its just useless. Have the forum separated from the first page with a link in the side. Also the background picture is also too much cluttered. Change it immediately with a clear one.
Also the menu on the left does not cover the text on the same line and over spill to the next line.
Goodluck

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I just visited your site, I use firefox, and it obviously hasn't been designed with firefox in mind. You may be surprised how many people use firefox as their default browser.
The text in the navigation menu is overlapping in some places. There is a white square covering most of the panel on the right of the site.
The forum is in a frame, rather than part of your site.
And the weather part, is at the bottom of the page.
The welcome text is obscured by the text below it.
You should get a forum, that you store on your server, rather than someone else hosting it as part of the forum service, as it gives you complete control. Also, having it in a frame is not a good idea, as some people use browsers that don't support frames, or phones and PDAs etc. You have to accommodate for these browsers as well, in fact, with web phones becoming more and more popular, many people are using their phones to use the internet.
Also, many people will check the whether on their phone, so you should probably have a graphics free version, for people on phones and portable browsers. I would suggest having a tab at the top to go to the forums. Doing this, would mean you can move the weather box up, which you need to do, as the site is primarily a weather site, and most people visiting will just want the days or the weeks weather, and some people, will not see the weather box, and leave straight away, and not visit your site again.
You have a stream of what i think is a weather report? but the media bar is right at the bottom, so no one will see unless they look around your site, also, it is not labeled, and with so many security threats on the web, not many people will click it just to find out what happens.
Another way to boost your sites visits and popularity, is to buy a domain name, an easy to remember one.
If someone intends to visit your site again, will just remember your domain name.
An www.echo-of-thunder.trap17.com is not easy to remember, and if your not consistently in the top few on many search engines, they will not go back from a search engine either.
Another thing, is that you have a hits counter, these are not a good idea unless your site is quite popular, as people seeing you only have 2500 hits, says that your site is not very reliable or is bad for some reason.
Consider one which users cant see.
The forum being in a frame, also means that users have to use the browsers scroll bar to move around the site, and that is annoying, and puts people off sites, because it is not convenient to use. This happens because the browser scrolls down thought the frame, before it can scroll past it.

 

 

 

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Word of mouth is not really going to help in this case. Spread the word on forums. Submit your site to search engines and relevant links list. Request site linkage and affiliation which websites related to weather. Also, you really need to do something about the layout of your site. It's very cluttered. There's this thing to the right that doesn't load for me and seems out of place, and there's a music playlist in the middle of it. Either the placement is weird, or it's incompatible with firefox, which is bad because a lot of people use firefox these days. Website attractiveness is one of the appeals that bring in visitors!

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