Please Review My First Wordpress Site

Love the look of it. What theme did you use?

Criticism wise, adding some relevant graphics would make a massive difference.

I really like your default "skin". The header graphic(s) have a good blend of colors that not only jump out at you, they make the text very readable. I also like the irregularly-shaped outline around the body.

I like the look of your site. It is obvious what is it about. The photos are nice and big and clear.
The theme is very professional looking.

I thought you might have an opt in somewhere but couldn't find it - maybe thats something on your to do list.

Great start.

Your site looks very nice, very clean. I like the theme you've chosen. While it's obvious what your site is about, and it provides a lot of information, I think you could organize it a bit differently.

I would create at lease a few static pages on the top navigation bar. For example the home page could be static, have some brilliant pictures and text copy explaining what you do on this site. You could include an opt in there as well. I only say this because the switching to different categories from the top navigation bar gets a little redundant.

It really does look very nice though. You have done a lovely job.

Wow! Im loving your website mate..
Its so clean and the theme you chose was pretty good too..
Thumbs up!

I always like to have a widgetized footer. 3 sections for putting custom widgets on them makes it a lot nicer ...

I think that the template is too boring and dark to talk about travelling. I would add some visual components especially to the header, for example: natural landscapes, historic buildings, etc.

Looks good

Thanks so much for sharing the theme Jesse.

Nice and clean - loaded pretty fast for me aswel!

looks good

Wow your worpress site looks impressive . more like a full fledged website.

I would add a page on my personal travel journal entries.

The rest of the design looks great.

On the review page, I might add in a scrolling gallery of pictures as a header.

A very good site.

its good., .clean and simple

Cool blog with matching color inside. You can add some widget in your side bar, such as for rent if you need moentize your blog. Travel is the best topics for some blog with high search global month.

Such a nice website. I suggest you post tags in every blog post

Add one attractive logo and change background color. Will be more attractive then.

Many of the images that are rotating in your masthead seem like amateur photos. I would replace them with some brighter, cleaner and crispier photos. Also, regarding those photos I can see you have a watermark on them which is cut-off by the black text box on the left, which should be fixed one way or another, either move water mark to right or remove entirely.

Very good. At first impression it build trust right away. You might need to add more finishing touch to the header, like a banner or something. For the posts, I reckon to have more enticing pictures because for the first few post that has the images, they really present themselves very well, however the feeling gradually diminished as I view down the page due to the lack of image I guess.

You might want to justify the post content, that way it'll look more tidy than the left align. Hope this helps.

Needs more vibrant colors!

Your website layout is not attractive enough to get the traffic you want. You may find the result on Analytic. Bounce rate must be pretty high.

I saw that you have used the Suffusion theme and I think you can improve your website a lot even using this theme.
For example you can add a background for each "read more" link and make that link to look more like a button.
You can also put 2 columns to display your articles and also you can extend your slider to full content width.
I don't think you can do this just from the Suffusion options...so for the beginning this is ok and in time after you learn how to modify your theme code you can add more elements.
Good luck!

Hi JesseN. Congratulations on your website! I'm from Singapore so I'm glad you liked our airport! You asked for a critique of your website, so I will provide some honest feedback.

I don't think if I found the site by accident that I would stay long at it. A previous poster mentioned it looked slightly dull and I have to agree. Brighter and cheerier colors would help.

The photos don't really do your travel stories justice. For example your title photo of the city in Philippines really doesn't give the reader any impression of the vibrancy of the city at all. It could have been any Asian city and does not pique one's interest. You'll need photos that will draw people in and make them curious enough to read your story.

Finally, I looked for your subscription form and found it only because I looked for it. You may consider making it stand out more.

That said, well done! It's not easy achieving what you did and you should be proud - I hope my comments will help you make it a little better.

The site looks good. Not totally sold on the colour scheme but it's ok. My suggestion would be that I wasn't sure what the site was for and who you were. If you're just giving advice on travelling and hoping to use the traffic to make money from ad's then ok, but I couldn't find any infomation about you or what the site is for.

Maybe it's just me, but I want to know you're angle before I would trust you and your opinion.

The site is beautiful with smooth look.
Few things I would like to point out is:
1. The site looks extra professional. You can Give it a fresh look by adding few natural or historical images.
2. You should use the hologram in such a way that it doesn't effects the beauty of any image.

Thats all I wanna say...

Okay, so let me be honest here. Since my background is in web design, I think I can give you a bit of advice

Pros:
- Main image slider is nice
- Consistency through all pages

Cons:
- LOGO. You are in dire need of a better logo. The squiggly thing looks like a kid drew it with a crayon Your logo is highly important (though many people will try and convince you otherwise). People want to feel like you're an authority, and all the business they put in this category have majors brands with recognizable logos. You should strive to join these big businesses in your visitors subconscious

- Color scheme. To me, if I'm looking for travel advice, I want a bright and vibrant website that reminds me of happy times....and of course that island paradise Stick with a white background, and use blues/greens/yellows as much as possible.

-Photos. They are extremely boring. Feel like I'm looking at a CNN website. This should not be the vibe when thinking of vacation. Use an image editor, or hire someone to make your photos "pop"

Hope this advice helps you understand some things you have going for you, as well as some things that need work. I commend you on taking the first step....creating the website. Now refine, refine, and refine some more until you have a work of art.

JM2C.

Well in your main image gallery, the text box is covering up a lot of the images. this would be fine, but your images' watermarks are half covered too.

Maybe just place a smaller watermark onto a corner or something?

Look simple, clean, fresh and elegant. Love the niche of your site.

Especially seeing as it is a travel site, i'd make it more visual- more pictures and graphics. Looks a tad subdued to me.

I really like the design and theme, but you need to add some more things to the header and the sidebar.

Never go too crazy with the header because it turns people away and pushes content down the page. But try something creative.

As for the sidebar I recommend using one of the best WP plugins I've ever used called "Special Recent Posts" - Just search in the plugins page in WP and you'll find it. I use this on ever Wordpress blog I make. Since you have an ad on the right side of the page (Which is correct and will get clicks) you should only set the plugin to show about 2 or 3 posts.

One last thing; I'm really glad to see you using Google+ and have it in your header. Google+ has been a life changer in terms of business and traffic for me and doesn't get enough credit. It's like social media finally done right. I followed your page and +1ed a few posts too

I agree that a call to action , or opt-in is needed now, on what looks a great trustworthy site.

Wonderful your wordpress site.
Actually it’s very neat and stylish design. Looks very professional.
I think that really needs work. Other then that, good job.

Ummm..is the theme iFeature by any chance? Anyway, many suggested the color scheme is wrong for a travel site and I am afraid I have to agree. Also the font is very boring and unsuggestive. I don't mean that you should turn your website into a rainbow one spiced up with all Google fonts on, but travel means vacation, luxury, visual memory and so on and a travel website should suggest a bit of that.
Anyway, it's a good start, keep going!

Looks great and nice work!

Its looking good mate. 2 Things., immediately I wasn't sure the scope of your site, i took clicking around to figure that out, sometimes this can be resolved by the tag line, or phrase.
Also should "Advise" be "Advice"?

I would echo the idea that you need more color, something that's a little more joyful and echoes the places people will be traveling to.

Also your featured article spinner is great, but I would recommend you make separate cropped images for the rotator or move your watermark to just be in one corner of your images. The images all feel very cut off in the rotator which makes the site feel incomplete or half done, I think fixing that would help a lot on click throughs to your actual articles.

To sum things up, it looks good, clean and light - loaded almost instantly.
Maybe a tad more color is needed because it's a bit dull for me.

Bit of a late review, but felt like doing it anyway!

Good idea having watermarks, but perhaps make them a bit smaller and place them in the corner of the image.
Seeing as your text box is floated on the left hand side, perhaps if you put the watermark at the top-left of the image, then that way it's not visible on the site. However if someone does download your image, then the watermark will still be there.

Also regarding the same section (the latest articles spinner), perhaps try rounding the corners. Every other module (sidebar widgets) has rounded edges, so it might look better to stick with this. Something along these lines should probably do the trick:

Very attractive....

I don't like the theme at all, I definitely think you could do better.. Check out themeforest for some awesome themes..

looks perfessional and clean.. love the content, keep it up dude

Great start although I echo many of the above suggestions:
1- possibly a theme wide colour theme change to make it more inviting and vibrant
2- crisper and more vibrant photos (I'm not a huge fan of watermarks... I know why they are used, to prevent theft, but it totally ruins the enjoyment of the photos.
3- having the black text bar over the slider really does affect the look and enjoyment of the photo... I know some sliders allow you to change the transparency of the text box background... is there any way to make that like 20% transparency so the text overlays on the photo and is readable but the full width photo shows through?
Great start though!