Your Comments on my Website Please

[sbrault74]

Please post constructive comments about my website:

http://www.thewebhostinghero.com

Some of the stuff you may want to look at:

• Free tools: http://www.thewebhostinghero.com/free-tools
• Web host lookup: http://www.thewebhostinghero.com/who_is_hosting.php
• Articles, news, tutorials: http://www.thewebhostinghero.com/blog
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/WebHostingHero

I'm still weighting the option of building a new website and if I do, I want to make sure I won't do the same mistakes again.

Don't be scared to be brutal... but constructive.

Thank you

Stephane

[SeoMartin1]

Header image is great but instead of header.png you could name it the-web-hosting-hero-header.png. The same for others pics

[Johnny4B]

Actually Martin ,sorry, I misread your reply and should not be questioning your logic in this case

[sbrault74]

How would that make the website better?

I want to get comments on the content quality.

[DanielFreedman]

You asked for brutality, so here goes:

The site looks, feels and smells like a scam.

The fatal flaw is the anonymity. No sensible person would ever attach any importance to buying reccomendations  that come out of nowhere from an anonymous nobody.

Worse, this garbled, illogical and contradictory disclosure is deeply buried in  a footer and confirms worst suspicions:

"This blog is a personal blog written and edited by me. This blog accepts forms of cash advertising, sponsorship, paid insertions or other forms of compensation.

The compensation received may influence the advertising content, topics or posts made in this blog. That content, advertising space or post may not always be identified as paid or sponsored content.

The owner(s) of this blog is not compensated to provide opinion on products, services, websites and various other topics. The views and opinions expressed on this blog are purely the blog owners. If we claim or appear to be experts on a certain topic or product or service area, we will only endorse products or services that we believe, based on our expertise, are worthy of such endorsement. Any product claim, statistic, quote or other representation about a product or service should be verified with the manufacturer or provider."

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I'm not saying affiliate marketing is always and everywhere wrong. But first you have decloak, publish valuable content free, and then be much more transparent in your disclosure. The basic pitch is that you would never jeopardize your reputation by recommending  anyting other than valuable products you use yourself.

[sbrault74]

(By the way, sorry for my english, I speak french!)

Well I don't mind brutal comments but I also asked for constructive comments.

That said, I appreciate your honesty however it's easy to bash something without suggesting how to make it better.

1. "The fatal flaw is the anonymity. No sensible person would ever attach any importance to buying reccomendations  that come out of nowhere from an anonymous nobody."

I do agree with you on that. Now how do I solve this? Should I include a byline with my picture in every post?

2. "Worse, this garbled, illogical and contradictory disclosure is deeply buried in  a footer and confirms worst suspicions"

I admit I simply copied the disclosure policy sent to affiliates by some web hosting companies. Do you have any examples of what you consider to be a clear, concise disclosure?

3. "I'm not saying affiliate marketing is always and everywhere wrong. But first you have decloak [...]"

What do you mean by "decloak"? To me, "cloaking" is showing a different content to search engines than to visitors.

4. "[...] publish valuable content free [...]"

Did you look at the 220 tutorials I published? I put a ton of effort into them to make them as valuable as possible. Unlike many web hosting sites, I DO know my stuff, I've been a programmer, web developer and sysadmin for more than 18 years.

http://www.thewebhostinghero.com/category/tutorials

That said, there is some early content that makes me cringe a little when read them. I'm setting them to "noindex" and removing them gradually.

I also provide some free tools I've developed myself and I think this one is especially useful:

http://www.thewebhostinghero.com/speed/

If you think the content is not valuable enough, please explain a bit further.

As for the top 10 lists, they will soon be transformed into valuable buying guides instead of simple comparison grids.

5. "The basic pitch is that you would never jeopardize your reputation by recommending  anyting other than valuable products you use yourself."

I do have accounts with most of the hosting companies advertised or listed in any top 10 lists (of course I get them for free most of the time). Obviously, I can't run 20 "real websites" just to use these services so what I did is I set up an identical blog on each of them and I perform benchmark test regularly.

Like I said, constructive comments are welcomed!

[sbrault74]

When I started this affiliate website about 5 years ago, I basically did the same thing that other affiliate sites did.

The reason why I posted this thread is that I'm aware of this and I want to take the website to another level. Eventually, I would like to get rid of the affiliate marketing business model and go toward selling advertisement instead. I'm not sure yet. But I can't do this all overnight. I need to get there gradually.

[DanielFreedman]

I completely missed the "valuable content" including the tutorials the first time around. I spent 10 minutes on the site -- about 9 minutes and 45 seconds longer than most people will spend. Which highlights the problem. The good stuff is buried. The initial impression is of a very dubious site.

It is not at all clear what the purpose of the site is at first glance. So users are forced to try to find out who created it. But they will fail because the information is not there.

**Constructive Suggestion: **Include a Mission Statement near your logo. Something like: "Your independent expert guide to website hosting." (If that's what you're doing.)

**Constructive Suggestion: **Completely reorganize your navigation and UX. Eliminate extraneous material.

The most important page on any website of this kind is the about page. You don't have one. See this article on About Pages. (Note: by de-cloaking, I simply meant revealing who you are on page.)

Try looking at this website by my client Jon-Erik Kawamoto for an example of a good About page that establishes the site owner's credentials. The site also surfaces valuable content. It uses a blog format and the right hand column sorts content by category and also recent highlights.

The other part of the right hand column includes some affiliate marketing stuff.

Along the same lines, take a look at this site by my former client Jon Goodman. There is a wealth of free material, along with some premium products and affiliate promotions in the right hand column.

Constructive Suggestion: Try highlighting your best tools and content on the home page, perhaps in promtional boxes.

[sbrault74]

Thank you Daniel for these great suggestions. I will get at it right away.

You see, I'm a programmer so this is the biggest part of my involvement in this site. I know very little about the other aspects and that's what I'm trying to improve.

[sbrault74]

What do you think about the new homepage layout?

I know I still have a lot of work to do, I'm still working on the About and Disclosure pages, the old ones are still there in the meantime.