$150 - $200 Budget - New Affiliate

poker69 · #1 11-12-2007, 12:27 AM

Hey similar to the $200 budget thread, but instead of having a good site with high traffic mines basically the opposite.

I am just starting my first site which is aimed to my City and the local university www.uwopoker.com

My site is not good looking at all I know this, I need some help in learning how to make nice and professional looking.

I do rank high in google for what I aimed for: London Ontario Poker and Ontario Poker

Im getting decent traffic but I need to convert visitors into players a lot better. I think a more professional looking site would make them trust me more and sign up for the sites.

Any Idea on how to spend my money?
Any suggestions to learn how to make a better site with dreamweaver?
Any thing else?

Thanks a lot for your help.

NewPokerGirl · #2 11-12-2007, 12:34 AM

The best suggestion I can give is to use that template you bought...it looked very good.

kaus · #3 11-12-2007, 12:38 AM

I would be aiming at University of London and possible way sto get your site noticed by those people (students)

As far as design I kow everyone is going to suggest the designer we all use here but my opinon on this one you should have something very unique. Most of these people will probably have seen everything under the sun and your site is different so make it look different.

Any clubs in the area do poker nights? Local advertising.

As far as the site

Get rid of the graphs (that blackbox with teh stars)If you cant design one that makes it look nice and clean than dont use it ...hence why i dont have those things

Your one review is good, but the other content needs to be worked on instead of a one or two liner. Find someone to help you write if you cant do it all yourself on a regular basis. Not knocking men but OMG can that pic of Brandi not die....(yours is way to big btw)

good luck, but if anything keep writing for your site even if you only do one article a day which I am sure everyone can manage something

kaus · #4 11-12-2007, 12:42 AM

One more thing...join the london poke meet up group. I am not telling you to spam the hell out of them. I wouldnt even mention your site till you are a good standing member but it will be another way for you to meet others in the area and get more feedback within the community. besides that if by chance you get chummy with them you may be able to advertise for each other

http://poker.meetup.com/89/about/

Graham · #5 11-12-2007, 12:47 AM

I'd use the $150 to either get the Alance guys to design a template for you, or run a contest on sitepoint/digital point for a new header and use a wordpress template. Then I would focus on redesigning the main page, so that it makes players want to play more online. For example, talk about news stories where local university players won huge online tournaments off low buy-ins (someone at Waterloo did it I believe). Rank the top sites that UWO students play at. Create a forum and run tournaments for UWO students with added value (ie. $5 tourney with guaranteed $100 prize pool and a cool UWO poker player t-shirt or something (again can probably get a cool design done through a sitepoint/DP contest). You could even give these shirts away to anyone that signs up through your site and joins the league. Hopefully you can get something out of that to get you started.

Graham · #6 11-12-2007, 12:48 AM

Yea.... like kaus said... scrap the Brandi pic. Why do you want a page for poker babes? Focus on news, events and stories that are related to your niche. Plus you won't outrank me for "Brandi Hawbaker" so there is really no point

NewPokerGirl · #7 11-12-2007, 12:59 AM

He actually has a good looking template (IMO) but he couldn't get it working properly ..and its very hard to explain technical things (for me anyway) on messenger and I even had some trouble getting it working properly (There are a lot of files and things I didnt understand) He gave me access to ftp but for some reason I couldn't log on. This is the template and it looks soo much better than the current on.

I have an empty hosting account, if I put all of those files in it and gave him ftp access and he transfers them to his computer and then he puts them on his site after cleaing out his root 1st...you think that would work?

Graham · #8 11-12-2007, 01:06 AM

I dont really like that template... too boring for me IMO.

NewPokerGirl · #9 11-12-2007, 01:13 AM

Ya it is kinda dull but it looks a lot better than the current one...it could still be spruced up a bit though.

poker69 · #10 11-12-2007, 02:08 AM

New Poker Girl - Thanks again for your help, I added you to my personal msn list in case you were wondering who that was that added you!

Kaus - Thanks for the input, I have been a lot at the local students here, and I will scrap those graphics as I suck with photoshop and I was just fooling around. I checked out London Meetup and it was London in the UK, but I found a smaller one in Ontario!

Graham - "run a contest on sitepoint/digital point for a new header" can you clarify what this means I havn't heard of this before. Good idea's with the t-shirt's I will try and figure a place to get these done (again don't know what the sitepoint/dp contest is.. i'll google it). And for the brandi section I didn't want to rank for it, just saw some sites with Poker Babes section and thought that's a good way to get some young men coming back

Is there any way to make my site more professional using the layout I have or would I have to use a CSS (CCS?) template thing. The one I got made for me the NPG posted hasn't been working. Would that site still be easy to rank in google with? (Im a noob but I thought that was a CSS site? and I heard those weren't as good for SEO.. I may be wrong)