Ask HN: Need help, how can we improve our site? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Need help, how can we improve our site?

1 pointdesouzt5 comments

Hi guys,

We've been running our site for a year now - getinspired365.com. We have a moderate audience who seem to quite enjoy the site and we got some great advice from the HN crowd the other day around SEO.

However, my friend and I want to improve the site. It's been going a year and we've now built up over 500 great bits of inspiration. We're really proud of our content but the trouble is we don't think people know that all this content is there.

The site is good if you want a new bit of inspiration each and every day. We send out a daily newsletter, with a quote, and a link to today's dose and we get some people who enjoy that. However, Upworthy - who do a similar type of thing to us (albeit a lot better!) get millions of users to it's site. How can we attract more people?

If you were us and you were building this site from scratch (but with the existing content) how would you build it? What would it look like? What should we focus on?

Any help would be really appreciated. Thanks in advance!

As codez says, I agree you could benefit from simplifying the design of the site.

I really dislike that you are completely focused on one thing, and then you suddenly hide that thing from me and show me other things I should click on. It's jarring, and dare I say inconsiderate. It's like those horrible ads that block content you're reading and force you to close.

I'd take a solid look at a clean design that shows the user a main bit of content for that day, and maybe a few other things they can click on.

Take a page from upworthy. They do a nice job of not overloading the user with too many choices to click on.

Hey,

I see no one else has put in any input but I'll give you my two cents.

For me personally, when I entered the site I wasn't ultra clear on what I was going to look at and it was all quite loud.

The in thing at the moment is definitely flat design and being minimal. I think your site is quite a cool idea, with the right styling it will be much more appealing to people I think.

Hope that helps a little. I'd be more than happy to help.

Best

There's too much competing text, IMHO. Focus more on the message and photo. And it's really bad to have a big sign-up box that pops up before I've got a chance to let the inspirational message sink in. That just makes me want to leave immediately.

Definitely agree with the comments about the sign up too. If the product is cool and people like how it looks and what it does for them they will be asking how do I sign up?

Thanks very much for your comments, we appreciate them.

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