My new site, what do you think?

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Mike

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Jun 27, 2006
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On the firing line
All Text Messages | Because you have a right to free messaging

Free text messaging site. Just finished it tonight. Bought a script from a member here, and popped it into a Drupal CMS. Wasn't as horribly difficult as I thought. The toughest part was figuring out how to allow people to view the content but require registration or login first. Figured it out finally.

Now, it's time to do directory submissions, and other SEO stuff. I'm going to go completely organic (well, 90% organic) with this one. Should be fun.

Let me know what you think.

Thanks!
 


Love the little affiliate opportunity thrown in there. Nice site man, looks better than the other shit kiddy sites
 
Looks good, a couple thoughts though...

The image of the cellphone next to All Text Messages on the left.. Looks pretty rough around the edges...literally.

Have you considered masking those affiliate links? A simple htaccess 301 for each link would work pretty well and make those look alot better..
Example:
http://www.alltextmessages.com/Cingular-Ring-Tones/ could just 301 redirect to http://affiliates.copeac.com/sw/7357/2310/&dp=97378

Personally, I think those clean URLs tend to work better rather then some unknown URL with a shitload of numbers and crap...
 
Nice, have you been able to test it out with different carriers? I had a site like this last summer, ended up dumping the project because of all the problems with the carriers formating the messages or the messages not going through at all. You can get a premium SMS gateway to ensure delivery, but that kills the whole business model.
 
Nice job, it has a professional feel to it. Except the phone picture in the upper left corner, of course.
 
I agree, that phone picture is pure crap.

get a nice pic of a high-end phone to put there.
Make that EUROPEAN high end, not American. :D

other than that, nice idea with the aff. placement.

If you need me to free a phoen pic for you (get rid of the Background), just send me a PM.

::emp::
 
I agree with everyone else. The phone looks like crap. Stick a photo of an iPhone up there and maybe lump in one of those "Free iPhone Giveaway" offers that I see so many of out there.
 
Its the standard Drupal theme :p

I would suggest that because you dont have much content, use the fixed width layout instead to remove a lot of the white space.

And yeah, get rid of that cell phone pic! Animated gifs are soooooo 1998! :p
 
LOL!! Damn, I was hoping that the phone looked better than I thought :D

Oh well. Yeah, it looks like shit. I'm not a graphics person, so for as ugly as it is, it still took me about 2 hours to do. Sad, I know.

Overall, I was really impressed with how easy Drupal is to use. Not like Joomla at all. It felt like a pumped up version of Wordpress, very intuitive.

I think I'm going to use the site for an SEO walkthrough. Keep your eyes on the Traffic section. I'll put everything here, not my blog.

Thanks for the feedback everyone!
 
hmmm, not sure how well this will work for you:
We see you're using Internet Explorer, which is not compatible with this site. We strongly suggest downloading Firefox. We think you'll like it better
Seeing as most non-techies are still using IE. However, the income from the firefox installs *might* offset the lost income from IE users that leave after reading that.
 
hmmm, not sure how well this will work for you:

Seeing as most non-techies are still using IE. However, the income from the firefox installs *might* offset the lost income from IE users that leave after reading that.

Not sure. Kind of a test, I suppose. It at least explains to non-FF users why the site looks like shit in IE. Only time will tell, but good point.
 
Not sure. Kind of a test, I suppose. It at least explains to non-FF users why the site looks like shit in IE. Only time will tell, but good point.

it makes me wonder if i'm on a page for text messaging or firefox. it is kinda obtrusive and have to scroll down to see something relevant i think.
 
it makes me wonder if i'm on a page for text messaging or firefox. it is kinda obtrusive and have to scroll down to see something relevant i think.

Hmmm...maybe I need to look at it again. I just glanced at it in IE to see if it worked. I think I can changed the module so that it's just a small 25 px high bar across the top instead.

More than one person saying it's annoying = trend in my book.

Looks good, Mike. I'm gonna throw up a link on my site to your new site.

Thanks! I appreciate that! :D
 
All Text Messages | Because you have a right to free messaging

Free text messaging site. Just finished it tonight. Bought a script from a member here, and popped it into a Drupal CMS. Wasn't as horribly difficult as I thought. The toughest part was figuring out how to allow people to view the content but require registration or login first. Figured it out finally.

Now, it's time to do directory submissions, and other SEO stuff. I'm going to go completely organic (well, 90% organic) with this one. Should be fun.

Let me know what you think.

Thanks!

Um to be honest it kinda sucks.

First when I loaded the site I got this message:


We see you're using Internet Explorer, which is not compatible with this site. We strongly suggest downloading Firefox. We think you'll like it better:
  • Firefox protects you from viruses, spyware, and pop-ups.
  • Enjoy improvements to performance, ease of use, and privacy.
  • Features like tabbed browsing make reading webpages easier.
  • Use Live Bookmarks that update themselves automatically with the latest content from the Web.
  • Automatic updates and faster browsing.
  • It's easy to import your favorites and settings.
Click the button on the right to download Firefox. It's free.

Um so that means 9/10 visitors to your site will read that message and hit the back button knowing the service wont work? Not very smart. If it doesn't work why tell them? You will get more money if you put adsense ads or something should it not work. Anything is better than the back button.

And second, you demonstrate your lack of SEO skills. The title should read: Free Text Messages. Get rid of the 'all' since it is a weak term.

Also, you didn't bother to put any meta tags.

LOL and Jon gave you an 'SEO guide' tag? Not to question his judgement but he should have screened the guide applicants more carefully.
 
Um so that means 9/10 visitors to your site will read that message and hit the back button knowing the service wont work? Not very smart. If it doesn't work why tell them? You will get more money if you put adsense ads or something should it not work. Anything is better than the back button.

O'rly? And you base this on...? According to statistics, Firefox makes up 31% of user's browsers. So, that equates to 7/10 if you just remove the FF users, but don't forget there are other browsers out there like Konqueror, Safari, Opera, Mozilla, Netscape, etc. So, looking at the browser stats page on W3Schools, for Feb 2007, only 58.7% of people use IE 5, 6 or 7.

Do some more research before running your mouth.

And second, you demonstrate your lack of SEO skills. The title should read: Free Text Messages. Get rid of the 'all' since it is a weak term.

Um...did you notice that the domain is AllTextMessages.com? And if you base my SEO abilities on a simple Title tag, you've got issues I can't begin to address.

Also, you didn't bother to put any meta tags.
No shit?!? Thank god you pointed that out. Lord knows its utterly IMPOSSIBLE to rank without metas!

You're a n00b without a clue, you're opinions hold no weight with me.
 
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