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SEO is the largest feeder of traffic for Twicsy. People get there by searching for a very long tail of things. But there are quite a few that return just to bro

SEO is the largest feeder of traffic for Twicsy. People get there by searching for a very long tail of things. But there are quite a few that return just to browse around it seems, or check out the top photos. Agreed, the UX/UI is terrible. One big problem is that I am a terrible web developer, I am really just a back end data guy that knows enough to be dangerous on the front end. But that's part of the reason why I think it has much more potential. The site gets a ton of traffic despite its obvious flaws. If I had the funds to do a redesign and even execute well on the basics who knows what could happen?

ashraful 13y ago
I'd love to do a free redesign for Twicsy. Email me (inlith@gmail.com) if you're interested. My portfolio is at madebyargon.com
- dumbfounder 13y ago
  Will do!
- slewis 13y ago
  I'm curious. Why free? Portfolio juice?
  - lcnmrn 13y ago
    I think he'll get money along the way. Link to his portfolio, more followers on Twitter, more people knowing what he does and everything else that comes with popularity.
  - ashraful 13y ago
    Free because I think the project has potential but the developer seems to not be interested in investing money on a redesign. If a free design can renew interest in the project, I think its a worthwhile cause. On a related note, I also do free designs for open source projects (eg. vlc, ack). So if your have an open source project that you think could benefit from design, feel free to get in touch with me. Working on such project helps me not just get my name out there, but also lets me learn a lot more than I can in commercial projects, since I usually get more creative freedom when I'm contributing my time rather than being paid for it.
triplesec 13y ago
it would make sense to hire complementary skills, like UX-design. I hear this is what the usual advices say.
sitkack 13y ago
seriously, just put images in divs and use some box to move them around. flat sexy gravity. ken burns effect for web 4.x
vidarh 13y ago
Given how long you've been doing this, you've overlapped with my last startup, which had similar issues (Edgeio.com - long since defunct; we started development in 2005; sold off the assets end of 2007; the service was a classified aggregator). We got a huge amount of traffic via SEO, and lots of long tail traffic (e.g. we'd come up first for a huge number of zip codes). A big problem with our consumer site was atrocious bounce rates: Most people clicked through out of curiosity, looked around on that single page or maybe one more, and left never to be seen again, because we did a really poor job of hooking them unless they happened to be looking for classified ads matching that particular long tail term, which few were. We should in retrospect have treated those visits as someone watching an ad for our site, rather than as a conscious visit by a user of our site, because most of our traffic was from people who likely did not even realise what the site was about by the time they clicked back or closed the window. A big part of the challenge for you as well, I think, is driving down bounce rates and challenging those users into other parts of the site and to repeat visits by helping them "get" what they can get out of the site other than 15 seconds of looking at that one image. If I was you, I'd segment users hard on referrals vs. direct traffic and cookied vs. uncookied (assume first time visitors). First of all, are you earning any money on those first time referral users? If not, that gives you total freedom to experiment. But regardless, subject the first time referred users to an absolute battery of segmented tests (A/B or multivariate or whatever scheme you're comfortable you can analyze results from) with pretty much the sole purpose of figuring out how to get more of those users to visit more sticky pages. Especially if people are coming in from long tail searches, I think you'd be better focusing on turning them into users than "drive by" assaulting them with ads like it feels like the site currently is doing. E.g. consider imgur. Consider users coming to imgur pages from Reddit (consider your specific traffic sources, and whether or not you can do anything "special" for them)- not only do they get an interface to navigate that in many cases are more convenient than continuing to browse the equivalent image reddits, but you can even go to imgur.com/r/someimagereddit (e.g. http://imgur.com/r/pics http://imgur.com/r/pics) and get all the pictures from that subreddit in one place. It's seductive. Then there's ability to comment. The image pages themselves are extremely clean. It's seductive. While if I get to your site from Google search results (say by entering "twitter babes" and going to the image results - I tested, it gives a Twicsy result high up, in between the porn), I need to go below the fold to even realize that there are related pictures, and there are no "niceties" like being able to use cursor left/right to move through a "gallery", or space to enlarge the image, as on imgur.com (if there are on Twicsy, I didn't notice them). What is there is massively distracting ads. Imgur is teasing people in when they hit it for the first time, making it very tempting to click one more image, while your site is pretty much bunching people in the face with ads, which makes it hard to even discover the potential.

ashraful 13y ago

I'd love to do a free redesign for Twicsy. Email me (inlith@gmail.com) if you're interested. My portfolio is at madebyargon.com

dumbfounder 13y ago
Will do!
slewis 13y ago
I'm curious. Why free? Portfolio juice?
- lcnmrn 13y ago
  I think he'll get money along the way. Link to his portfolio, more followers on Twitter, more people knowing what he does and everything else that comes with popularity.
- ashraful 13y ago
  Free because I think the project has potential but the developer seems to not be interested in investing money on a redesign. If a free design can renew interest in the project, I think its a worthwhile cause. On a related note, I also do free designs for open source projects (eg. vlc, ack). So if your have an open source project that you think could benefit from design, feel free to get in touch with me. Working on such project helps me not just get my name out there, but also lets me learn a lot more than I can in commercial projects, since I usually get more creative freedom when I'm contributing my time rather than being paid for it.

triplesec 13y ago

it would make sense to hire complementary skills, like UX-design. I hear this is what the usual advices say.

sitkack 13y ago

seriously, just put images in divs and use some box to move them around. flat sexy gravity. ken burns effect for web 4.x

vidarh 13y ago

Given how long you've been doing this, you've overlapped with my last startup, which had similar issues (Edgeio.com - long since defunct; we started development in 2005; sold off the assets end of 2007; the service was a classified aggregator). We got a huge amount of traffic via SEO, and lots of long tail traffic (e.g. we'd come up first for a huge number of zip codes). A big problem with our consumer site was atrocious bounce rates: Most people clicked through out of curiosity, looked around on that single page or maybe one more, and left never to be seen again, because we did a really poor job of hooking them unless they happened to be looking for classified ads matching that particular long tail term, which few were. We should in retrospect have treated those visits as someone watching an ad for our site, rather than as a conscious visit by a user of our site, because most of our traffic was from people who likely did not even realise what the site was about by the time they clicked back or closed the window. A big part of the challenge for you as well, I think, is driving down bounce rates and challenging those users into other parts of the site and to repeat visits by helping them "get" what they can get out of the site other than 15 seconds of looking at that one image. If I was you, I'd segment users hard on referrals vs. direct traffic and cookied vs. uncookied (assume first time visitors). First of all, are you earning any money on those first time referral users? If not, that gives you total freedom to experiment. But regardless, subject the first time referred users to an absolute battery of segmented tests (A/B or multivariate or whatever scheme you're comfortable you can analyze results from) with pretty much the sole purpose of figuring out how to get more of those users to visit more sticky pages. Especially if people are coming in from long tail searches, I think you'd be better focusing on turning them into users than "drive by" assaulting them with ads like it feels like the site currently is doing. E.g. consider imgur. Consider users coming to imgur pages from Reddit (consider your specific traffic sources, and whether or not you can do anything "special" for them)- not only do they get an interface to navigate that in many cases are more convenient than continuing to browse the equivalent image reddits, but you can even go to imgur.com/r/someimagereddit (e.g. http://imgur.com/r/pics http://imgur.com/r/pics) and get all the pictures from that subreddit in one place. It's seductive. Then there's ability to comment. The image pages themselves are extremely clean. It's seductive. While if I get to your site from Google search results (say by entering "twitter babes" and going to the image results - I tested, it gives a Twicsy result high up, in between the porn), I need to go below the fold to even realize that there are related pictures, and there are no "niceties" like being able to use cursor left/right to move through a "gallery", or space to enlarge the image, as on imgur.com (if there are on Twicsy, I didn't notice them). What is there is massively distracting ads. Imgur is teasing people in when they hit it for the first time, making it very tempting to click one more image, while your site is pretty much bunching people in the face with ads, which makes it hard to even discover the potential.