First Non-Parked Site, Please Give Advice

[TwoStep420]

Hey guys,

So I own about 50 names and most of them I have parked and earning not a lot of money. I decided to take a few hours and pick one of my names to try and develop into a site with content. This is my first attempt at making a site and integrating Adsense ads in. Any feedback is appreciated. Thanks!

FoodandDrinks.info

- Zander

[DomainMagnate]

not bad
Add more content and links

[nicedomains]

Sorry, gotta be honest here. I don't like the theme.. A site about food and drinks should make me hungry, looking at the header of this site makes me dizzy. IMHO the entire color scheme needs to be re worked. Also, the tag cloud being larger than the other font on the page seems a bit weird.

I think that your ad placement within the posts is good and the content (assuming you keep adding more) will be the key to making money on your site. I hear good recipe sites pay well. Good luck!

[tetrapak]

When you create a site, whether it's a mini or a full blown website you should be perfectly clear with the concept. Your site seems to be schizophrenic. Are you sure people will be searching for "food and drinks" to find random food and drink recipes? I know if I wanted to cook I would go on a food recipe site, if I wanted to get drunk I would buy a bottle of vodka.. Kidding aside, I would go on a cocktail recipe website. Problem is, if I think about "food and drinks" what comes to my mind is culinary differences between countries and cultures. "food and drinks in Mexico" "Asian food and drinks"... Your site however mixes food and drink recipes instead.
... and I don't think people are looking for that.

[ftaylor]

Is the link to the diet pills website deliberate?

[south]

Clean look overall, but put some food & drink images as a banner instead of a tree

Also, separate the title(s) into separate words (Food and Drinks) for better search spidering. And use the words as keywords in your meta tags. It'll be a lot easier to get ranked for "food and drinks" or "food drinks" than "food" or "drinks".

And, like others mentioned. Content content content...

edit: yes, that's better! And add some alt tags for the images.

[TwoStep420]

Sorry, gotta be honest here. I don't like the theme.. A site about food and drinks should make me hungry, looking at the header of this site makes me dizzy. IMHO the entire color scheme needs to be re worked. Also, the tag cloud being larger than the other font on the page seems a bit weird.

I think that your ad placement within the posts is good and the content (assuming you keep adding more) will be the key to making money on your site. I hear good recipe sites pay well. Good luck!

I appreciate your opinion. I went ahead and changed to a cleaner theme. I think it looks a lot simpler now.

When you create a site, whether it's a mini or a full blown website you should be perfectly clear with the concept. Your site seems to be schizophrenic. Are you sure people will be searching for "food and drinks" to find random food and drink recipes? I know if I wanted to cook I would go on a food recipe site, if I wanted to get drunk I would buy a bottle of vodka.. Kidding aside, I would go on a cocktail recipe website. Problem is, if I think about "food and drinks" what comes to my mind is culinary differences between countries and cultures. "food and drinks in Mexico" "Asian food and drinks"... Your site however mixes food and drink recipes instead.
... and I don't think people are looking for that.

I def. see your point. I guess I thought it would be weird to just have one or the other when the domain name contains both. If I had more free time I would consider your idea of having pages devoted to different cuisine.

Is the link to the diet pills website deliberate?

Nope

Clean look overall, but put some food & drink images as a banner instead of a tree

Also, separate the title(s) into separate words (Food and Drinks) for better search spidering.

Do you mean change the name from "FoodandDrinks.info" to "Food and Drinks"? I'm a little confused about what you mean. Thank you for the input though.

[dotNetKing]

I think you've done well to make a start. You can't really start learning until you start, is what I think.

To make money you obviously need traffic.

How do you plan to get this? Type-ins, repeat visits due to good content, incoming links due to good content, search engine traffic from good ranking?

I'm interested in how things go, as I've made a start at dabbling in this sort of website - simple content plus adsense. Poor results so far, but it's early days.

Your traffic stats are likely to be unrepresentative at the moment due to visits by DNFers

Please keep us posted of any developments.

[south]

Do you mean change the name from "FoodandDrinks.info" to "Food and Drinks"?

Correct. Or Food and Drinks - Info( or Information)

[TwoStep420]

So I went ahead and did a completely new design. I think it looks a lot better now. Still open to input. Thanks again!

[tetrapak]

Now that looks awesome. I have to take a note about the tag cloud again though hehe. The main purpose of the tag cloud is that it is constantly updating and shows the main keywords to SE's, and if you use that flash thingy, it is really cool but absolutely worthless.

[TwoStep420]

Now that looks awesome. I have to take a note about the tag cloud again though hehe. The main purpose of the tag cloud is that it is constantly updating and shows the main keywords to SE's, and if you use that flash thingy, it is really cool but absolutely worthless.

I read on the website for that plugin that browsers that don't use flash see the cloud as a regular tag cloud. Is that total crap? It does look cool though.

From the plugin website:

"Hey, but what about SEO?
I’m not sure how beneficial tag clouds are when it comes to SEO, but just in case WP Cumulus outputs the regular tag cloud (and/or categories listing) for non-flash users. This means that search engines will see the same links."