My wordpress site, The Investor’s Journal

Also, do you think my website looks like a blog? My intention was for it to not look like a blog.

I’m not a design expert, but I like it, it’s organized, and the ads aren’t attacking the post haha (I hate ads between the title and the first paragraph), maybe there are a lot of ads, but for me that’s not a problem, because they aren’t annoying when reading.

The color scheme is simply but well implemented.

At the moment it doesn’t look as a normal blog, well, it doesn’t look lik a blog for me. I see it like a guide or a dictionary.

About the content, I’m not interested to be an investor and I’m not old enough haha.

But there’s something that you may change, I don’t know, maybe the fonts…no idea about what.

Thanks for your feedback.

My intention was to place ads on my website but keep them out of the way so they don’t become too annoying. Although it makes me wonder if doing this also makes my ads inefficient. That’s something I won’t know until I get more visitors.

Also I completely agree on the fonts. I don’t like them that much (they are the default fonts from the theme). I’ve been so busy doing little tweakings to the theme that I completely forgot about changing the fonts.

One problem I’m considering is the fact that my site doesn’t look too different from it’s default theme, so I’m considering changing the color scheme from blue to green. That way if someone has a website using the same theme as mine, my site will still looking somewhat different.

well Ill be honest it looks pretty bare to me — and I block ALL ads..

Not sure what that means …

That’s probably why it looks bare. The sidebars have ads in them that really seem to fill out the page.

I appreciate the honesty though.

content does a better job of filling out a site ??

I’ll make one recommendation — since your doing sort of a niche site, you might want to work on building up a reader base before doing the ad thing.

ads are a real turnoff, and I tend to think that sites that focus on ‘investing’ (can you say forex) tend to get lumped into the .. ermm, “just another investor site with ads” category of sites that ppl never go back to.

Ill give you a success story.

Years ago, I was approached to do a phpBB site for someone. Hes a pennny stock guy and wanted a forum where ppl could talk stocks.

I made his site, did all the modifications, etc..

Initially, there was not a single ad on the site.
He waited a while — posted some good stuff on his forum, and it grew.

Today, he had ads. Today, he requires registration just to look at the posts. And he has over 10,000 active members on his forum.

you might even know the web site if I dropped the name. ??

Believe me, my biggest concern is content. My goal is to have a quality over quantity article filled site. I know what you mean when you say “just another investor site” (I’ve been checking out the competition), and my goal is be the complete opposite of that. The problem I’m running into is that I don’t have many investor friends, so it’s hard to get critiques on my articles. I truly believe that at the very least, the one article I wrote called “How to avoid market corrections and crashes” provides genuine value (using the techniques I describe in the article, I dodged two market corrections this year so far). I’m trying to keep writing articles like that, so I do want content to fill out my pages, not just ads.

But the problem here is that I chose that theme so I could specifically place my ads away from the content (the main page is the only page that has an ad in the post). So if anything, I’m trying not come off as “I just want to make money”, but I never considered how bare the website would look with someone who had an adblocker program.

Any suggestions?

Also, I’m going to make a guess and say the website you’re referring to is Hotstockmarket.com

I turned off the adblocker — fwiw, it IS nice that the ads don’t interfere with the content, in the least. Though you are right about the “filling in” bit.

A refresh though and I got a big boxxy ad in your content — that one I would ditch!

Other than that – write ??

If I ever get on my own financial mess, maybe I’ll bookmark you.

—

Hotstockmarket.com

nope! danceswithbulls.com

(the forum has changed substantially since I did any work on it, I suspect)

I noticed, for example that while he’s restricted browsing, the feed is still wide open .. which tells me that either he’s doing the work himself, or hes got someone involved that doesnt understand phpBB.

Well, you’ve got three visible blocks of ads, plus a Yahoo web hosting ad:

<noscript><img src="https://visit.webhosting.yahoo.com/wisit.gif?1189400454" border="0" width="1" height="1" alt="visit" /></noscript>

Seems like kind of a lot.

The yahoo ad doesn’t visually show anywhere on the site as far as I can tell. I just noticed I have the option to activate a plugin called “Hosted by Yahoo! badge”, but it is deactivated.

Are you seeing the yahoo ad actually showing on the website or just in the code?

It’s just in the code.

Okay well I reduced the ads down to two now. One long and narrow skyscraper ad on the further to the right sidebar, and one that appears right above a single-page post. I think it’s much less intrusive now. The funny thing is I got my first clicks today after reducing the amount of ads shown. How ironic =)

I’m working on adding a most-popular list to my sidebar now. I’ve already found a website with the exact same theme and color scheme as mine and it’s embarrassing. So I’m going to experiment with a green color scheme.

I just changed the color scheme to green. Let me know what you think.