I am trying to make my site a better user experience please help

[ClaireH-184886]

Hi, i want someone to review my site and let me know what steps i need to do to make it a better experience for the user and to lower my bounce rate which is about 67 at the moment.

I am trying to get the advertising and the user friendly to match, i need the adverts to make money and need to make sure i have them in the right place so they get clicked more.

I want to reduce my bounce rate and want people to not just read one page but to go to different pages and would like advice on what i need to do.

here is the site http://www.in2town.co.uk

and here are the example pages that i would like to focus on to increase the user friendly and keep people on my site while making sure i have the adverts in the right place

http://www.in2town.co.uk/news/gossip-celebrity/alex-reid-says-he-is-fed-up-with-chantelle-houghton-lies

http://in2town.co.uk/news/travel-holiday-news/sainsburys-customers-10-points-back-on-easyjet-flights-with-nectar

http://in2town.co.uk/news/small-business-news/how-emerging-technology-can-help-reduce-small-business-costs

I am looking for ideas on how to increase the experience and how to keep people longer on my site while at the same time have people clicking the ads by increasing the conversion rate.

[xoffie]

Hi Diane,

Many things effect bounce rate, you must also be careful when using Google's bounce rate stats as they don't always tell the full story (if you're linking to external domains as a big part of your biz it will count that as a bounce also). But very specifically to your site I'd say you have some trust and load time issues.

Re; Trust - elongated faces and repeated images don't say to me that this is a professional site, so that wont help your bounce. The logo also needs a bit of a revamp imo.

Load Time - It took me 10 seconds to travel from home to travel - thats about 10 times more time than i would expect.

If you address those two issues, trust and load time, firstly, and use Google analytics as a benchmark (that magical 67%) and then dig a little deeper.

Lastly: Re your biz model, I'd recommend trying to match the ads to the consumer a little more closely, if Im interested in Travel, maybe some travel ads? The ads I found were not retargetting ads or travel based ads. How do you hope to get people to this site: if its just via unique content driven via Google then keep in the theme of the clicked SERP?

[ClaireH-184886]

thanks for this. i will come back to you on some points later but first of all, i am getting different reports on the times which is not good. i have tried lots of different tools to get the times. what do you suggest i do to try and increase the loading times from home page to travel.

the timing is a huge headache for me at the moment. i will sort out the images straight away

[ClaireH-184886]

can you let me know how you timed from home page to the travel section so i can try and solve the problem please

[xoffie]

Hi Diane,

http://www.numion.com/stopwatch/Start.html?Url=http%3A%2F%2Fin2town.co.uk%2Fnews%2Ftravel-holiday-news%2Fsainsburys-customers-10-points-back-on-easyjet-flights-with-nectar&WebtimerButton=00%3A00%3A01.851

Try measuring the speed of your pages with this.

What hosting do you have?

[ClaireH-184886]

thanks for that. i will try it now. i am using tmd hosting, a dedicated server, next week i am moving to a larger dedicated server in the hope it will speed my site up

[ClaireH-184886]

love this tool. where is it testing the speed from, is this uk based or a different country.

[xoffie]

de nederlands reg there - didnt ping it to check ip