Two sites I put up - feedback appreciated.

[teachwny]

I started playing around with pligg a few weeks ago and decided to go live with one of my sites. The other is live, but very raw.

I used the silverbullet template on both sites. I haven't done a lot of modifications yet, but I like the clean layout of the site.

teachWNY.com
This site is live. I've tried a few things to monetize it as you can see. I've added a few static pages. It's a job board for teachers in my area.

Pligg Beta 9 / Published News
This site is live, but has zero content and I haven't promoted it at all. I'm testing it. I've made a left sidebar modification to the template, but it's ugly and hardcoded into pligg.tpl. This is a news site for upcoming record releases.

Anyway, let me know what you think!

[hedgehog13]

Looks like a good niche site. I see you have already put ads on it. Are you hoping for traffic through Google or do you have plans to advertise it in local or teacher related media?

I know teachers love their gold stars but I suggest replacing them with green apples as in your favicon.

[teachwny]

Originally Posted by hedgehog13

Looks like a good niche site. I see you have already put ads on it. Are you hoping for traffic through Google or do you have plans to advertise it in local or teacher related media?

I know teachers love their gold stars but I suggest replacing them with green apples as in your favicon.

I'm hoping for word of mouth and eventual indexing by the search engines. I put an ad on craigslist and that's generated about 400 unique visitors in the last week, so that's a good start.

Thanks for the apple idea!

[rubber2002]

Both sites are down?

[teachwny]

Originally Posted by rubber2002

Both sites are down?

I just used them. Maybe you hit them while I was working on them. I've been busy tinkering.

[onlinebisnes]

same here..I just see a landing page for both site..

[neerajn]

Hi all pligg users out here, i have setup this site www.topinews.com , i request to please review and provide feedback. thanks

[BHealth]

Originally Posted by teachwny

...

teachWNY.com
This site is live. I've tried a few things to monetize it as you can see. I've added a few static pages. It's a job board for teachers in my area.

...Anyway, let me know what you think!

Really nice TeachWny. You're doing a lot of things I plan to do on my site eventually. I like how you took out the numbers (vote count), and even replaced the numbers in the "top stories' panel. I guess you've realized that in some cases the counts are not relevant. I might do this for my site, but i'm really thinking about it first (b/c the counts are a little relevant for me in some cases).

Also, good idea to put a "how to use" page on your site, I think that some of the ppl who visit my site (and who are not familiar with Digg) don't quite know how to use it).

And finally, I can see that your site is well monitized, . How are you doing if you don't mind me asking, (your audience well be mostly teachers looking for work, and employers looking for teachers)? How often do they click through?


Thanks, very nice job overall.

[teachwny]

Originally Posted by BHealth

Really nice TeachWny. You're doing a lot of things I plan to do on my site eventually. I like how you took out the numbers (vote count), and even replaced the numbers in the "top stories' panel. I guess you've realized that in some cases the counts are not relevant. I might do this for my site, but i'm really thinking about it first (b/c the counts are a little relevant for me in some cases).

Also, good idea to put a "how to use" page on your site, I think that some of the ppl who visit my site (and who are not familiar with Digg) don't quite know how to use it).

And finally, I can see that your site is well monitized, . How are you doing if you don't mind me asking, (your audience well be mostly teachers looking for work, and employers looking for teachers)? How often do they click through?


Thanks, very nice job overall.

Thanks for the kind words. I didn't see how numbers and voting would be relevant to a job board, so I just figured I would eliminate them entirely. So far, so good. Most of the people checking out my board probably don't know what digg or pligg is and wouldn't understand that aspect of social bookmarking.

As for the how to use page, you'll want to search for "static page" in the forums. You'll find the bit of code to do that trick. I've done it for several pages, but it would be nice to see that functionality in the back end of pligg at sometime in the future.

I don't know if it's well monetized, but I've got some adsense and affiliate banners up. My site has only been live for a month, but I cleared over $90 through adsense last month on a little over 100 clicks. Clickthrough is fairly low, but I usually get a couple bucks a day. My best day was $19. I haven't really gotten into keyword optimization as I'm still working out ad placement. Some clicks are 10 cents, some are 3 bucks.

As for the affiliate ads, they've generated clicks but no income. I may drop them and target local advertisers who would be willing to pay a set amount each month for a banner. I could probably bring in a few banners from local colleges and offset whatever loss I would take on dropping affiliate ads.

Anyway, I haven't done much outside of the box on this install. I used the silverbullet template and slapped an extra column on the left hand side to accommodate 160x600 skyscraper ads. I've only seen a little bit of spam so far, but the KillSpam User function is pretty awesome.

[chuckroast]

As for the how to use page, you'll want to search for "static page" in the forums. You'll find the bit of code to do that trick. I've done it for several pages, but it would be nice to see that functionality in the back end of pligg at sometime in the future.

Not to thread hijack, just wanted to let everyone know this feature has been added to the codebase and will be available in the next version, or if you can't wait you can get it from the SVN