Review: lack of members

Ash17

New Member
Hi,
I setup a website/forum a couple of months ago and I was wondering if you'd be able to have a look at it for me.
I can't work out why none of the current members post and I only receive about 1 registration a week now, anybody got any ideas what's putting people off?

The main page is http://www.thedropinn.com
The forum is http://www.thedropinn.com/forum

Many thanks.
Kindest Regards.
 

StephanieCordray

New Member
Okay, right off the bat, I see two problems. One is the forum hasn't quite reached critical mass yet... that's the number of members it takes to keep it from lying dormant on a day to day basis. The second is your home page. It says nothing about what the site is for. People see that, lots will leave if they are looking for something in particular or they'll click on a link, maybe 2 before they leave. And this was a very quick look I took. I was there maybe a total of 10 seconds for both pages.
 

Ash17

New Member
Thanks for your reply.
I've changed the homepage so the very first thing you read is a description of the site. As you say, a quick 10 second look is probably all it needs to put you off the website and this is true as 40% of visitors to the site stay less than 30 seconds.
Hopefully this should help a little, just hope I get more people registering for the forum.
Another thing is Googlebot is always there (possibly to do with Google Adsense) yet my website never gets indexed, which is odd.
 

ian

Administrator
Staff member
to receive an answer the any questions
should read "to receive an answer to any question"
Looks like the forum is doing quite well seeing it was just started in december 04, well thats what it looks like, could take a bit longer to get listed in google. The google adsense bots are different to the spiders which crawl your site for their actual search engine.
 

Ash17

New Member
Ian: You're a star.
Didn't see that mistake myself.
The actual forum was setup on 19th December, so I guess it isn't doing too bad beings that's less than a month ago. The website's been up a couple of months but wasn't related to the forum back then.
 

zkiller

Super Moderator
Staff member
i don't know if anybody else came across this problem, but non of the images on both the main page and forum index displayed for me. :shrug:

other than that, i agree with both stephanie and ian. :)
 

StephanieCordray

New Member
they worked for me, too, z
as ian said the googlebot for adsense is quite different from the spider that indexes your site... I've had the mediapartners bot on mine for ages and still not indexed on google.
 

Ash17

New Member
Regarding the images not showing...
Are you by any chance running Nortons Internet Security.
If so, disable the privacy function as I think this hides your referrer and the hotlinking protection stops the images being viewed.
 

zkiller

Super Moderator
Staff member
that's weird, but you are right, disableing my firewall did allow the images to load. never had that problem before. i wonder what you are doing for this problem to arise. deffinitly something to look into and fix, as most will not want to disable their firewall just to able to view your site, if you know what i mean. :)
 

Ash17

New Member
You only need to disable Privacy Control and it will work, either that or I disable hotlinking protection which will solve it.
 
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