newbie here - seeking input about site and traffic

I think you know that very well. Already started marketing through forum posting.

I don't think it's a terrible-looking site, overall.

I think you need to find a way to incentivize the opt-in more. You're not trying hard enough at the "list-building" but could easily improve that. Offer people "special information about a hot-off-the-press discount deal not advertised on the site", or something? "To be notified of updates" just isn't good enough. And it would help to explain "We will never sell, rent or otherwise disclose your email address to anyone", as people do, as an anti-spam reassurance.

Some of the English is a little clunky and uncomfortable. For example ... "Should you explore a brief history, you will notice that Edouard Heuer was the famous Swiss watch manufacturing company who founded the famous Tag Heuer watches". That phrase "Should you explore a brief history ..." just couldn't possibly be written by someone whose first language is English, and that shows to anyone whose first language is English. It wouldn't do any harm to have the entire site's contents read over by a native English-speaker, anyway. There are a lot of grammatical problems, too: things like "there has been numerous developments", which should say "there have been numerous developments" (because "developments" is a plural word and needs the plural form of the verb). Sentences like "Rather they often were built with a hinged brass cover that may be opened up to determine time" are pretty close to unreadable, to be blunt. "To determine time" just sounds like someone's put "to tell the time" through the spinner, and it's produced something typically spun, i.e. non-idiomatic to the point of being almost unreadable.

I appreciate that this isn't the main sort of thing you were asking about, but I think it would be a shame to attract floods of targeted traffic to the site without putting the content into readable English first. Sorry!

It would be really good to use something like PrettyLink to mask your various affiliate links, which look pretty unpleasant at the moment.

You also urgently need some basic legal requirements, I think, such as an affiliate disclosure, and so on?

Hey!

Ahmen to Alexa, she's bank on, particularly on your call to action...

I have 2 points to make:

1. Facebook widget needs to be higher to give it BETTER exposure...
2. The width of you site needs to be wider.

So, my suggestion is to change the set up of your Wordpress site to have columns on both sides. On one side a 'Call to action' over the Facebook Like Tool and your adverts on the other side....

That would make it nice and clean!

HTH...?

Llwyddiant!

Joe

Alexa - great feedback, thank you! I will begin working on those items right away. On my list of things to do also is get buttons for the different social media sites like Twitter, digg, etc on the sidebar.

What Alexa said.

Also, something is terribly wrong with your header. You have black text on top of your header image.

I think your color scheme is a bit "dark". I'm not really feeling the energy, rather a "good enough for them" attitude comes to mind.
Perhaps have a read on colors and how they can energize or de-energize a person.
This is a good article I found on the subject:
An Introduction to Color Theory for Web Designers | Webdesigntuts+

Good point Alexa, I just thought they would help get me traffic... I tried doing SEO work on the pages by want to do as much as I can to drive some free traffic to the site. What do you recommend outside of social media?

Thanks Jesse - I played around with colors A LOT, but honestly never even thought of doing more research into it, so I appreciate the link.

I've obviously got some more work to do before cheering into traffic methods, and I'm very thankful for everyone's feedback so far!!

Looks good, looking at the site you can modify your meta-tags, meta-keywords and other images with alt-tags.

Other have already said about the social "buttons " and ofcourse you can browse through this forum and you will surely find some good hints and tips of getting some good traffic.

Kind regards,
Swrajit

I'm not seeing the black text on top of the header image, does everyone see this?

I know that not everyone is designer but you should take a look at other web pages that deal with watches and try to copy from the best. Or get inspired by the best

You have to put your self into the shoes of the customer. Look at it from their perspective. You are writing about watches. And if I can see about expensive watches. Tag Heuer (my favorite ), Bulova, Keneth Cole, Breitling, Movado and so on and so on... What do they have in common? They are expensive and luxurious... Your web page looks neither.

So, you will be attracting customers with deep pockets or the ones that would like to have deep pockets. And the way your site looks right now, well, its not appealing and it does not represent the niche you are talking about.

I am art director for 15 years and I have something to say about it. I know that it is expensive to invest in some design but there are so many free and cheap wordpress themes out there that are easy to use and look great.

Basically you cannot design web page for kids and use some monochrome elegant minimalistic design for it. I hope you understand what I am saying.

Bond1806 - thank you for the constructive criticism. As this is my first venture into building a website, I really thought it would be easier than it had been. But I'm committed to improving the look of the site because as much as it looks decent now, I always think of I myself would visit the site to buy watches... and right now it's a maybe.

I think implementing some of the suggestions I've gotten here will improve the look. It will take some time but I'll get there!

Any and all advice is appreciated!!

No problem... Design is one of the key elements of attracting users.
Here are few wordpress themes that I found in few seconds that could look good to your niche.

Traction Demo
ThemeMin Demo
Bold News Demo | Just another WordPress.com site

All three different but all three could serve a purpose. Imagine some nice images of watches instead of these dummy images. It could look cool.

It looks a nice site

Just one thing for me is the ads down the side which takes me off to different sites, which may lose sales. |I tested on WP and i was getting affiliate sales for books (cheaper option) but not my own products as I was offering high street authors which stole my thunder
If you are offering ads though maybe make them open on a new tab (html - target="blank" )

But good on you for getting out there and doing it and heres to your success!

I'm leaving on vacation tomorrow and will spend some time working on the site while I'm away. Will let everyone know when I've made all the changes suggested here so you can take another look and so I can move onto getting traffic to the site.

Thanks again everyone for all the feedback!!

it's not extremely pleasing on the eye to look at.

Colour scheme, full width logo and sidebar are not really the best. In the sidebar or above the content I would have quicklinks to latest posts or latest deals for example. I'd also scrap the full width huge logo area and stick a smaller logo on the left with an adsense or some other banner on the top right hand side.

There are so many theme templates that you can grab from themeforest or likewise.

I do like the domain name you've snapped up, precise and your site does what it says on the tin. Also content is good with the right stuff you'd expect when landing on a site of the name you have chosen.

Ok, I've spent a lot of time doing work on the design, making the site look more professional and also adding the required legal pages, etc. Still need to clean up some of the text in the articles like Tag and clean up the affiliate links though.

Please take a look and be brutally honest!! I just have a couple more things to work on before starting to drive some traffic...

www.bestwatchdeals.com

I would like to suggest you to start with all social networking sites. It would work great if you handle it properly. You would get lots of free traffic within very short period of times. I know some sites those provide genuine traffic via social networking sites. Just get register with one of them and see the result. It's free but you need to spend some quality time over there.