Experiment Jon
07-04-2005, 09:12 PM
First of all, that is a heck of a lot of new members. I would check by here more often, but now I have my own guild forums for Guild Wars, and spend most of my time there. However, there are some things that I have noticed about the site, and here are some of my new comments on it, and improving Duel Yugioh in general.
1) Hurray, the forums has been stretched to full screen. That looks a lot better than the squished thing before.
2) The article section NEEDS to be cleaned out. There are repeat authors. Several "Duel Yugioh staff" authors who are actually the same thing, and none of them wrote "real articles." A huge overload of repeat authors ranging from Magmar 2000, to Jonathan McD to Sang Bui. Cleaning that up would be helpful. And finally, does rating articles actually still work? Hmm, and I'm not sure if keyword search is a premium feature, but a keyword search for articles would be extremely helpful.
3) Oh yes, still on the subject of cleaning out the article section. AGN is pouring big bucks into paying article writers. It really doesn't make much sense to put spammy discussions in the article archives. People come here looking for real articles. They run into 2 sentance intros to forum posts. You just lost a visitor. Put good stuff, and only good stuff into the article archive. Do not put discussions into the article archive, throw those in a new section, under resources or something. I mean, its good that those discussions exist, but just put it somewhere better. For visitors, its better if they see 1 page of solid articles, rather than 5 pages of mixed spam and good articles.
4) I'm not sure what kind of work goes into compiling the top 50 card list, or how long that work takes, but I'd suggest updating that. Seeing as to how its one of only two major things listed under Resources, people won't be happy to see a 6 month outdated list. I was going to write an article analyzing the cards here...but realized two things. 1st, its outdated. 2nd, there wasn't enough information on how the cards are actually selected.
5) Same thing goes for the decks to beat. This is busy work. Just copy and paste some new decks into that section. Looks better for first time visitors.
6) Premium section. Nobody is going to sign up for yugioh premium. Honestly. I mean, yeah, they'll sign up for MTG, and maybe Beating Poker (although Duel Yugioh gets 2,700,000 monthly hits compared to 200k.) But if you want people to sign up for premium, here are some suggestions. Details one click away. BIG NO NO. If you're going to make me move my lazy hand to click to see what kind of rewards I get for signing up, and have a full page of cookie and login how-to info right on the page, I say I'll just go without premium. Plus, I seriously do not like that puke yellow on the premium page. Try putting a picture to make the color less obvious. Also, more premium restricted features, which flaunt "HA HA, YOU HAVE TO BE PREMIUM TO ACCESS THIS" may make more members want to become premium. Currently, the only major one is searching the deck archive, which honestly is mostly spam. Nothing that I cannot do at Metagame for free. Think of something unique that you can force serious players to pay for.
7) Here are your current Meta keywords, as generated by my super secret website spy agent...yes I know everything about your site...fear me, LOL.
yugioh, Yu-gi-oh, deck, monster, duel, yugi, card, decklist, report, strategy, news, store, price, box, pack, single, foil, spoiler
Oooo...I'm going to flip over these. 1st, why the heck is box, pack, single, and foil included on this? You are not selling cards. It does not help you at all to put these words on your keywords. Especially if they don't show up anywhere on your pages. Google uses keyword and keyword frequency to find websites. Use some keywords that actually show up. This brings me to my next point. Where's the word "Article?" /slap\. The word doesn't show up often, but you could easily fix that. OK, sure I can find your site by searching "yugioh article" on google. However, you're beat out by Yugiohetc.com. That would be OK if they were a good site with good articles. They're not. Try using better keywords that show up more often.
8) Synch the bars on the extreme top of the sites, so that they offer access to EVERY AGN page. Not sure if you have fixed this now, but before, certain pages were unreachable. For example, even now, I'm pretty sure the duel-yugioh main page does not have a link to gamics from the top. That may explain why gamics gets only 150k hits a month... :P.
9) The card search database is very nice. I'll say that. I prefer it over any other avaliable card search database. Maybe you should try promoting it more. (or be evil and make it a restricted premium feature.) After of course, letting people use it a while and become dependant on it. (Man I'm evil...)
10) I don't like how contact us opens up my outlook, or whatever that Email program is called. IDK. People may like that, but personally, I find a page with all the contact information would be better, then clickable links to open up outlook. And of course, not eveyrone uses outlook.
11) Article contest is no longer called the Grand Prix, or whatever it used to be called. So, it may be confusing to people when you refer to it as the GP in the rules. Page is also ugly and hard to read due to the puke yellow colors. Again, try balancing it out with pics if you do not wish to change the font color.
12) Ok, this one isn't specific to duel yugioh. But as I go on in guild wars, I am finding an increasing number of people who play Guild Wars as well as SWG and WoW. Most of the people in my guild have converted to GW after playing SWG and WoW. I talk to a lot of people in GW when recruiting, so I get a lot of "OK, I'll see you later Jon, I'm going to play some more WoW/SWG now." Yeah....linkage...Just something to consider. But doesn't really matter, since Warcraft realms gets about 3x more hits than my favorite guild wars site anyway. :P
Hmm... Thats enough knitpicking for now. Man, I should get paid for this...lol.
1) Hurray, the forums has been stretched to full screen. That looks a lot better than the squished thing before.
2) The article section NEEDS to be cleaned out. There are repeat authors. Several "Duel Yugioh staff" authors who are actually the same thing, and none of them wrote "real articles." A huge overload of repeat authors ranging from Magmar 2000, to Jonathan McD to Sang Bui. Cleaning that up would be helpful. And finally, does rating articles actually still work? Hmm, and I'm not sure if keyword search is a premium feature, but a keyword search for articles would be extremely helpful.
3) Oh yes, still on the subject of cleaning out the article section. AGN is pouring big bucks into paying article writers. It really doesn't make much sense to put spammy discussions in the article archives. People come here looking for real articles. They run into 2 sentance intros to forum posts. You just lost a visitor. Put good stuff, and only good stuff into the article archive. Do not put discussions into the article archive, throw those in a new section, under resources or something. I mean, its good that those discussions exist, but just put it somewhere better. For visitors, its better if they see 1 page of solid articles, rather than 5 pages of mixed spam and good articles.
4) I'm not sure what kind of work goes into compiling the top 50 card list, or how long that work takes, but I'd suggest updating that. Seeing as to how its one of only two major things listed under Resources, people won't be happy to see a 6 month outdated list. I was going to write an article analyzing the cards here...but realized two things. 1st, its outdated. 2nd, there wasn't enough information on how the cards are actually selected.
5) Same thing goes for the decks to beat. This is busy work. Just copy and paste some new decks into that section. Looks better for first time visitors.
6) Premium section. Nobody is going to sign up for yugioh premium. Honestly. I mean, yeah, they'll sign up for MTG, and maybe Beating Poker (although Duel Yugioh gets 2,700,000 monthly hits compared to 200k.) But if you want people to sign up for premium, here are some suggestions. Details one click away. BIG NO NO. If you're going to make me move my lazy hand to click to see what kind of rewards I get for signing up, and have a full page of cookie and login how-to info right on the page, I say I'll just go without premium. Plus, I seriously do not like that puke yellow on the premium page. Try putting a picture to make the color less obvious. Also, more premium restricted features, which flaunt "HA HA, YOU HAVE TO BE PREMIUM TO ACCESS THIS" may make more members want to become premium. Currently, the only major one is searching the deck archive, which honestly is mostly spam. Nothing that I cannot do at Metagame for free. Think of something unique that you can force serious players to pay for.
7) Here are your current Meta keywords, as generated by my super secret website spy agent...yes I know everything about your site...fear me, LOL.
yugioh, Yu-gi-oh, deck, monster, duel, yugi, card, decklist, report, strategy, news, store, price, box, pack, single, foil, spoiler
Oooo...I'm going to flip over these. 1st, why the heck is box, pack, single, and foil included on this? You are not selling cards. It does not help you at all to put these words on your keywords. Especially if they don't show up anywhere on your pages. Google uses keyword and keyword frequency to find websites. Use some keywords that actually show up. This brings me to my next point. Where's the word "Article?" /slap\. The word doesn't show up often, but you could easily fix that. OK, sure I can find your site by searching "yugioh article" on google. However, you're beat out by Yugiohetc.com. That would be OK if they were a good site with good articles. They're not. Try using better keywords that show up more often.
8) Synch the bars on the extreme top of the sites, so that they offer access to EVERY AGN page. Not sure if you have fixed this now, but before, certain pages were unreachable. For example, even now, I'm pretty sure the duel-yugioh main page does not have a link to gamics from the top. That may explain why gamics gets only 150k hits a month... :P.
9) The card search database is very nice. I'll say that. I prefer it over any other avaliable card search database. Maybe you should try promoting it more. (or be evil and make it a restricted premium feature.) After of course, letting people use it a while and become dependant on it. (Man I'm evil...)
10) I don't like how contact us opens up my outlook, or whatever that Email program is called. IDK. People may like that, but personally, I find a page with all the contact information would be better, then clickable links to open up outlook. And of course, not eveyrone uses outlook.
11) Article contest is no longer called the Grand Prix, or whatever it used to be called. So, it may be confusing to people when you refer to it as the GP in the rules. Page is also ugly and hard to read due to the puke yellow colors. Again, try balancing it out with pics if you do not wish to change the font color.
12) Ok, this one isn't specific to duel yugioh. But as I go on in guild wars, I am finding an increasing number of people who play Guild Wars as well as SWG and WoW. Most of the people in my guild have converted to GW after playing SWG and WoW. I talk to a lot of people in GW when recruiting, so I get a lot of "OK, I'll see you later Jon, I'm going to play some more WoW/SWG now." Yeah....linkage...Just something to consider. But doesn't really matter, since Warcraft realms gets about 3x more hits than my favorite guild wars site anyway. :P
Hmm... Thats enough knitpicking for now. Man, I should get paid for this...lol.