not staying on my site very long

I'm going to point out a handful of things here:

1. Your choice of typography has readability issues. Usually, it's not ideal to use sans-serif fonts for large blocks of text. I'd consider simplifying this problem by changing your type to a serif font in black. This has been studied many times over as being the most readible text online. Use successful websites as proof.

2. Your site has some cosmetic flaws. I'm going to assume that you're using SPRY in Dreamweaver and the functionality of your code seems rather flawed. On rollover, the children of the navigation drops down below the parent. This is unattractive to any user and naturally instills distrust in your blog.

3. KIS - Keep it simple. Stay away from multi-color layout schemes. They're generally unnecessary and can annoy your users. While this strategy can work for selling a product, it will bounce people from your content. It's only natural.

I'm out the door but will think a bit more about your site. Consider the things I've said as my forte is Web Design!

Where are you getting your traffic from?

If your traffic isn't targeted then I would understand why this would happen.

Most of my traffic is coming from searches and from forum and blog posts. The forum and blog posts are only from specific places so they should be very targeted.

Hey Mark,

Here's what I'd do if I was you.

1. Install Wordpress
2. Find Wordpress Travel Theme
3. Use all those pages under "about us" as BLOG POSTS.
4. DISPLAY BLOG POSTS ON HOME PAGE

You need some personality on the home page to draw people in. If it just looks like drab, dull information they can find in any encyclopedia why would they stick around.

Having blog posts on your home page WITH PICTURES and even better WITH VIDEO will draw people in and bring people back for more.

People will visit your site for possible travel info but they will come back FOR YOU. If you're able to regularly add posts about traveling in Italy you will build a bigger fan base.

Old site? You need a full revamp, it doesn't look like a trustworthy place to look for traveling details. I agree with TC Web Solutions. Using wordpress and a theme would be the fastest and easiest way.

Ok Lovenot why doesn't the site look trustworthy, I could understand someone saying that if all I had over all my pages were adds and articles trying to sell something but I don't I barely do anything in that nature. This is one of the reasons I try not to ask questions on forums if you are going to make a comment like this you should put in some information as to why you feel that way. How can I change my site to look more trustworthy if I don't know why you think it doesn't look trustworthy. Otherwise I would just ignore the comment like people ignore really bad web sites. Ps this site isn't even a year old so why would I need to revamp it.

I think the thing you have to remember is that people are coming to your site to fulfil a need. I'm guessing that need is information from your site. So once they have what they need they leave. There is nothing holding them there.

I think the look of your site is fine, its certainly inviting but maybe you could add a personal touch. Its about your travels but there are no obvious photos of you.

Also, you can try installing something like Disqus, its a commenting system that will let your readers comment on your posts - get a discussion started.

cheers,
Simon

The only problem I see on your site is too many scrollbars. My browser already has a scrollbar, yet you add another one on your content. And worst, each and every page I see has a scrollbar. Now tell me, why do I need so many scrollbars for?

Going down further, on your "Plan Trip" page, I would expect the description to be some kind of excerpt or teaser to your full article, but no, you put in the full post there, and with (not again!) scrollbar for each one there.

Your site looks nice. But I have no interest in reading anything there if I need to adjust so many scrollbars every time to read your content.

- Rufas

I agree. The immediate problem I had with the site were the scroll bars. Your site should be easy to use and navigate. Although the scroll bars may seem like a small issue, it may be this small issue that is driving traffic away. My immediate thought when I went to the site was, "Ugh, What's up with the scroll bar?!" I suspect your visitors are having the same reaction.

The scrollbar existed because you used height. And the reason you do that is because you used position absolute to style almost everything. You really shouldn't do that. You should be using these common CSS attribute for styling.

float:left; / float:right;
clear:both;
margin:0;
padding:0;

I'm afraid that is going to be a major overhaul when I look at your source code. It is not as clean as it look.

- Rufas

Mark, here's what I see. A visitor lands on one of your pages and sees your most relevant article, ads in the sidebar that are related to it, and your top navigation. It's already been said that the user has to work two scrollbars to read your whole article. That's just weird, and a turn-off, and makes your site feel like it was built by a beginner. To me, the "untrustworthy" effect is only because of the non-standard user interface.

It really is okay to have all the text right there in the main area on the left, and let people use the browser scrollbar to scroll down.

Anyway your visitor has landed, and you want him to stick around. The next problem is your visitor has to work to find out, "Is there any more information on this site I might be interested in?" You make your visitor mouse over each menu option to see what's there. Visitors won't do that, so I think it explains your high bounce rate.

Here's what I would try first, if it was my site:

1. Take an inventory of all the content & advertising. Divide it into two groups: article titles & ads that you wish every visitor could see, vs. those it's okay for them to dig deeper for. (Honestly, I think ALL your content might be worth showing to every visitor but I admit I didn't look at everything.)

2. In your main left area of each page, put the article -- without a scrollbar. ALSO, in this same left area, between paragraphs and at the end, put the related advertising that right now you're showing in the sidebar. If the article is long you can even have a related ad show more than once.

3. In your sidebar, put the list of article titles you decided every visitor ought to see. (Make them links.) Below that, put ALL your ads that appear on any page. Just stack them up. Space them nicely, align them consistently (to the left, or on center). Don't space the ads as far apart vertically as you have them now.

4. Back on the left, at the bottom of each article, put a list of related articles. People who finish reading like to read more. This is great for reducing bounce rate. For example every Plan Trip article would have a list of all the Plan Trip articles below it, headed Related Articles.

I think if you did all this you'd see a difference without switching to wordpress or doing a complete redesign. There are other things that make site look beginner-ish, like the funky motion menu buttons and your hard borders and flat colors. But get as far as you can with what you've got.

Patey

Thanks for the advice Patey and so far you are the only person on any of the forums I go to that has given me any real good feedback and if you have time I have a few question and a few things to run by you. First you mentioned something about a non standard interface, I am not sure what you mean by that because I didn't choose the interface, I used the most up dated web editor from the company I got it from and it was just updated in June of this year and I use a very popular host so I don't know who between those two may have to do with the interface. I also don't really know how I could change it or even what the standard interface is.
As far as the scroll bars are concerned I only put in the one for the text box where my articles are because the whole article won't fit on the normal screen. One of the things I read over and over is that search engines and people don't like blank spots at the bottom of a page and if I made my page long enough to hold my entire home page then the other articles on the other pages would have giant blank spots at the bottom of them. I know I can make pages with only the main scroll bar on the right side of the screen but that also means if I want pictures on the side like I have that I would have to put in a lot more pictures in order to not have a lot of blank space there either.
I also don't know what you mean by funky motion menu buttons because all the sites I looked at when planning out my site they all seem to act like mine does when you hover over them with the mouse the drop down screen shows the other pages, I don't see them moving around so I don't really know what that means.
When putting my site together I looked at so many sites and didn't like many of them, One very popular site is lonely planet. They have a long menu bar across the middle like I do but there isn't any information on any of them. The only thing they have is a section called destinations and when you scroll over it you get a normal sized drop down screen with continents listed, if you click on the little arrow next to europe you get another drop down screen but off to the side that takes up almost half the page. I only say this because I didn't think it was that big a deal to run a mouse over the menu bar to see if something else is there. I guess I could change the title of a box in the menu bar so people would know there is more information there.
I know the lonely planet site is popular but I just don't like the looks of it, there are little bits of stories scattered all over the page and to me it just looks like a big mess and when I come to a site like this I just want to get out of there. I also realize that if this is what is real popular that if I want to be more popular that I need to do something a little more like this but not as much. I just want things to look nice and simple. However most of the other popular sites are laid out more like mine.
Those are my questions on your comments and I have a few questions again if you have time I am not trying to get someone to design my site. I also would like to say with my web editing software it would be real easy to change things and not worry about how the site looks because I could open the site in my web editor and just say save as and give it a new name and I have another complete copy of my site to play with without affecting the other copy of the site at all.
My questions are first what are your thoughts on what I said about people and search engines not liking empty space at the bottom of pages, Like I said my home page may be 2000 words long and the others may be only 1000 or so, what would I put in the blank space. If I make my master page longer the other pages will automatically be longer same with making it shorter and as far as I know I can't change the size of individual pages but I will find out if I can.
What is your thoughts on if I got rid of the plan trip drop down menus and just went to the plan trip page and got rid of all the full length articles in the little text boxes and just put little snippets of the article with click to continue or something at the bottom like so many other sites do. This would be something like you said to do this way people wouldn't have to hover the mouse over the menu bar to see if there was anything else here they want to see. Although now that I think of it if they didn't click on the plan trip menu box to go the plan trip page how would they ever know there were other articles for them to read. For me it seems very complicated which it makes it hard for me to know which direction to go. Maybe I would have to put all that information on the home page and put completely different things in the menu bar. Thank again Mark

Make site simple and show what the intended purpose of site is.

Thanks a lot Patey I now know what you mean by funky scroll bar and I will have to get in touch with web plus see if they can tell me if I can make it stop moving. In there system I just chose one of there standard scroll bars and didn't see anything saying that they would move when you hover over them. Also a lonely planet style of site would be easy on web plus because I can put in as many text boxes as I want I would only need to not put in a scroll bar and just put click here to continue like they do. Again thanks for all the ideas and I will see what the web plus people can tell me about some of what you are telling me sorry I kept saying scroll bars when I meant nav bar. Mark