New site just launched - would appreciate some feedback!

[followuk]

Hi,

Some may have seen me around the forum recently asking a few questions about my website which was being re-vamped. Well its now live.

www.followuk.co.uk

Would love some actionable advice / constructive criticism.

Website background: It started life as a website displaying dates for UK bank holidays, noticed some good traffic/sharing so decided to open it up to UK occasions. This resulted in more traffic and social sharing so over the last month I have re-built the whole website to be responsive and 'I hope' professional / interesting to visitors.

I also opened it up further into other UK dates such as sporting events and festivals - these categories will gain more pages as well as new categories to come. I'm hoping to turn it into a little UK resource for this type of content.

Thank you.

[Host1]

Looks fairly nice, clean design. The calendar-part could use some work though. What about a calendar for the current/coming year(s) where you enter all the dates/events and allow users to just use checkboxes to decide which dates to show on the calendar? Would be much easier to use, as it is now it takes way too much work for a visitor to check the dates for several holidays/events/whatnot.

[followuk]

Yeah its a good idea, I think I need a few more pages to make it worth the users time but I could see a basic account login then each page containing a add/remove button which works against the users personalised calendar. Maybe even just a cookie instead of an account but guessing it would be super annoying if that cookie got deleted.

We have something kind of half way, so if you entered rootdomain.co.uk/august you can see pages being combined into a group depending on date - once these pages are full enough (9 pages) we are going to create some functionality for the user to select one and view it.

[EGOL]

I think that you are off to a good start and have some good content in the Bank Holiday area (I didn't look at others).

If this was my site I would do a couple of things.....

1. On this page http://www.followuk.co.uk/bank-holidays a person must scroll down to see the real content.  There is a lot of eyecandy at the top but what people really want is deep.  The first bank holiday date is 700 pixels down!   I would redesign to lift that up a lot higher.

2. On the bottoms of your pages you have paragraphs that explain the bank holidays.  I would link the name of the holiday in the table to those explanations.  That will help optimization and allow visitors to BAM...  get that info.

Nice work.

[followuk]

Thanks very much for coming over and making some suggestions.

1. Good point, I will create some anchor points in the table to info lower down page. I see what you mean by 700px down, I wanted to put a little content above it because I didnt want Google crawling it and just finding thin content above the fold - I will have a look at this tho and see if I can find away to get the good stuff higher up.

How important do you think social sharing for SEO is for this type of content? Would say A/B testing for more social shares be a high priority? or forget that just keep adding content?

Thanks.

[EGOL]

How important do you think social sharing for SEO is for this type of content?

I honestly don't know.  If you are getting a lot of traffic from social sources then it might pay.   Right now you are giving massive amount of page space to social sharing.  I would simply use a very sleek AddThis.com widget.

Would say A/B testing for more social shares be a high priority?

I would use AddThis.com widget in an obvious spot.  I think that the quality and usefulness of your content will be the major driver of social shares if you use an obvious widget.

[followuk]

Ive added your idea of links inside table to body content so thanks for that.

Those social buttons are using the addthis service, just styled against the theme of the site. But I see what you mean, im thinking of dropping it altogether and using the sharedcount.com API in a format similar to mashable. It aggregates all social shares into one number and cuts down the button clutter.

Thanks for your help on this, I think the 'true' aim for me is to make my landing pages better than any other I find - I think if I achieve this ill be heading in the right direction.

Ill give it 3 months and share where im at in another post.