Would you please take this apart for me?

[horney]

My second go at building a porn site. Thanks to those who took a look at the first, I hope this is a lot better.

I mean it when I say take it apart. I really want to start off with a site which stands some chance of success, however long it takes to put it together.

My next step will be to set up a server and buy a domain name - or three or four. I've thought of several names and a WHOIS search shows some of them are available.

I know I need to put in a video or two, that's my next thread on the how to questions, and I want to put in one more advertising feature.

The URL is the same as before, http://slidex.pornwebring.net/index.html oh, and the story is not one of my originals. I really want to launch them with the site itself so I've used a free download for the purpose of illustration.

[phuckbunny]

OK, Horney, I'll start first. The good news is that design wise it's better than what I saw in your first shot. The bad news is that I still don't fully understand what it is you're trying to do. Here comes the rip:

I don't understand why you are so against just starting to blog. If you're good at writing copy, and erotic stories in particular, blogging is a no-brainer as being the number one and natural choice.

Before I say anymore, ask yourself and then tell me how you plan on bringing traffic to your site.

Your three natural traffic sources would be SE traffic, traffic trading through a script, or just simple hardlink exchanges. At this point, this site will not bring you any traffic from any of those sources. You can't trade traffic, it's not SE optimized for anything and no one will want to put a hardlink up to you.

You said rip it apart so that's what I'm doing. Can you write back with an idea about what your vision for your ideal site would be? I'll also add that, as I may have mentioned before, reinventing a format is fine as long as it's not reinventing the wheel and something you shoudl try once you have already worked with some well proven formats and learned how they work. You seem to know a lot about programming and servers and a lot of other stuff, why are you ignoring the issue of how to get people to actually visit your site?

Write back

[sunfunbill]

Ummm, I have to agree with pb here. When I clicked on your link, I really did not understand what I was seeing. Is that a blog? It looks like a few pages of ads, and that's it.

Thinking outside the box is good, but if people can't figure out what your trying to do, well, that's TOO far outside the box.

Like Pb said, tell us just what your trying to do, then we can give you more advice. What I saw has no way to get traffic.

[odysseus]

I'll agree with phuckbunny in that it really seems like you should be working the blog thing. If you like to write erotic stories, then you have the opportunity to not only create content that the search engines are going to like, but there are things you can do easily with a blog to get others to help you promote your site. Wordpress has some great plugins for this.

For example, there is a wordpress plugin that puts an email box after every post so that someone can email the post to a friend. That's not likely to be used on say, a tranny splog (since I doubt Joe Redneck is going to be sharing his secret tranny fantasies with his friends at the bar), but for stories, it may work. I don't know much about stories, and who likes them, but it seems that there are a lot and they don't mind interracting with each other. (I only assume this based on a couple quick visits to literotica here and there, and I could be wrong)

With a blog, you can take advantage of real time search engines like technorati. When you post, you ping them all and get some traffic that way. Feedburner has some good tools to help you keep your readers coming back.

Then there are the social media sites, and so much more. If you are capable of actually writing some serious content, then I'd really recommend you look into blogging.

Now, about the site you actually asked for a critique on...

I think the colors are pretty good, and the layout isn't bad. It's nice and simple, yet not harsh on the eyes, so your advertising stands out. Like the previous replies, I'm not sure exactly what you are trying to do with a site like that, but I think that if you simplify it a little bit, like make it only one page or 2 (a picture page and a story page) With the picture page, it could be very similar to http://slidex.pornwebring.net/welcome.html but with each thumb linking to an html page with the pic, linked to the sponsor, and links above and below the pic to the sponsor. Maybe use only half the thumbs you have now, and mix elements of that page with elements of http://slidex.pornwebring.net/myftvfpa1.html on the same page. By the way, that is a very well layed out page for encouraging clicks to the sponsor. Hell, you could have just that page and the story page even.

What I'm getting at is that the site you have made is more similar to a simple SEO page than any other site model such as free sites, blogs, galleries, TGP's and what not. Since the site doesn't follow the formula for any of the types of sites I just mentioned, you won't really be able to submit it anywhere, and your primary source of traffic will be SE traffic (which is insanely competitive in your niche and you SEO skills will have to be rocking)

The good part about not being able to submit a site like that to TGP's and what not, is that you can put as much advertising on it as you want (which is why I recommend HTML pages for the pics).

What I would do, in all honesty, is make a template similar to what you have made with this site, and make a new site each day specifically targeting a different keyword or search phrase each day. Then, get a good link dump submitter, and dump each site after you make it. You won't get a lot of traffic this way, and it won't be good traffic, but some link dumps have hard links and may help you get your sites spidered quickly. Also, once you have a little traffic, you can start playing with where you send it a bit. But, the reality is that even making sites like that every day will only get you a few sales here and there. You really do need to be trying to get as much high quality traffic as possible. In my experience, the 2 best avenues for that have been blogging and free sites. Making SEO pages would compliment either of those well IMO.

Ok, I hope I made a little sense. I had too much "bottled Xmas cheer" last night, and too little coffee so far today.

[Hammer]

All the critiques in the world aren't going to do you a damn bit of good. How do you plan to generate traffic to a website once it's finished? If we all spend our time giving you critiques until you design the prettiest site anyone has ever seen you'll only be at square two.

You need to spend more time learning how adult webmasters actually make money and less time building the site. Like PB and everyone else said, you could have spent a matter a of a few hours learning how to build a Wordpress blog and be a lot closer to having something that might ultimately make you a few bucks instead of spending all this time designing... well, I don't have a clue what.

It looks to me like you are putting all your effort into figuring out how to make a website that makes money but without traffic, it's all a moot point. And a website like yours isn't going to generate traffic on it's own. On the other hand, a properly done blog can generate a lot of search engine traffic almost magically.

[horney]

Thanks, guys. Back to the drawing board, then. If the point of what I'm doing can't be seen by anyone else, however clear it may be to me, it is not going to work. OK, I'll lay out what I've been trying to do and why, and where I think the traffic would come from.

The main point, of course, is to make money. Otherwise I'd just do a free site and say "Come and look everyone, aren't I a clever boy." The time scale, within reason, isn't too important, either. It's more about generating a steady income stream over a longer period in return for a reasonable amount of (continuing) work. Yesterday would be nice, of course.

So, I had a look around and saw loads of so called free sites where I'm asked to get my cheque book out at first click. Or everything is free but the quality is, in the main, garbage. The free sites advocated in Cozy Academy and elsewhere have been much harder to find, so it's been difficult to find real life working examples. These are the ones with a "warning page", main page and two or maximum three gallery pages, possibly an advertising page in between the main page and first gallery page, looking to advertise a single sponsor. Are there any lists of such sites? Can anyone here point me at some?

That model seems fine in theory, but I wanted to do something a little bit different (hey, if I have to do that to learn then experiment later, that's what I'll do). I can write. A story is a story. A report is a report. Only the dressing is different. Tits, bums, pussy, cock, is the dressing for this genre. So I looked at a lot of erotic story sites. All most of them do is stories. But many of them do other people's stories, and of those many give a link from the story to the author's site. So my idea is, publish a story on my site but also syndicate it to a fairly large batch of such specialist sites. Writing stories and articles to publish on other sites as well as your own is a great way of generating traffic in the non-porn world. I still think it may work. But not if I can't get the focus of my own site right to start with. (But while I've been typing this in a text editor, Odysseus has come in with some great, constructive comments - for which very many thanks)

So, the idea is a free site with a story and, over time, a bunch of previous stories which are still there on the site. With a new one every say, three days, that's ten new ones each month, so it could grow to be a sizeable site and open out further options.

On the search engine side, I don't know if anyone's had a look at the source code, but it's all CSS. The only table is to classify the stories. The biggest input into that site has been writing a stylesheet from scratch so I don't have to go finding space for another load of credits to joe sad who wants his name on the web somewhere for ordering a few lines of code which are already in the public domain. Provided I can create the uniqueness I can soon change a few words here and there to get it up the rankings. The traffic driven by the story site links will help tremendously there, too. SEs recognise existing traffic as well as optimisation.

My next steps, it would seem, are to try a couple of Odysseus's tips, set up a VLM (Virtual Linux Machine) on a non-porn server so I can use a database or two - these thieving lying free site providers are trying to nick traffic before I have any as well as not providing what they promised, just as Hammer said they would - and buy a domain or two so I can get on with it. I advocate avoiding pornwebring.net and parkyourporn.com for anyone wanting to try the free hosting route.

Finally, I'm not against blogging or anything else. Indeed, that's in the longer term plans. It's difficult to give it a dummy run without a database to work with, though. Besides, I still like the outline idea I have, even if it will take some effort to shape it into a working model. Although if anyone can point me at several porn blog sites so I can see how it works, that would be helpful.

[odysseus]

For a list of free sites to check out, go to any link list. The gold standard can be found at http://link-o-rama.com most other link lists accept free sites that follow his rules. For an example, here's one of mine:

http://www.camsexworld.com/webcam-porn/tiny-tits01/

Now, here's the power of free sites. I made that site January 18, 2006. I built it, submitted it, and forgot it. It still gets traffic, and even made a sale in the past week. I can make a blog post linked to it if I want (and I have). The main page of that site is a blog and I've blogged my free sites on it and other FHG's. Since I've gotten better at blogging and the way I have this one set up is cumbersome to update regularly, I have largely forgotten about it as well, and it still gets traffic and makes sales.

My point is that what Hammer said about traffic is key. For me, free sites have garnered a good bit of long term traffic. But blogging is a great way to get the short term AND the long term traffic. Something to consider would be to make up little story pages with some pics on HTML pages like I mentioned, and put a teaser excerpt on a blog with a link to the story, and a link to a gallery in the post. Your blog could then be the "hub" of the other sites. The point by which they are all indexed and linked out to. This is a site that you could get some link trades going on I'm sure, and start getting some traffic.

Further motivation for blogging for you. I have put up blogs, and made sales on them within 24 hours of building the blog and putting up some posts on it. When Hammer mentioned that the traffic comes almost magically, there is some truth to that.

I remember when I started out, I wanted to do something different as well. It took a long time, and reading a lot of posts by people like Hammer, for me to get it into my thick head to start trying these established models. Once I did, that's when I started making sales. Once you know how to get traffic, then you can try new things and see if something works, but the traffic generation really does have to come first. At least for me, that was a long (and expensive) lesson to learn.

On the search engine side, I don't know if anyone's had a look at the source code, but it's all CSS. The only table is to classify the stories. The biggest input into that site has been writing a stylesheet from scratch so I don't have to go finding space for another load of credits to joe sad who wants his name on the web somewhere for ordering a few lines of code which are already in the public domain. Provided I can create the uniqueness I can soon change a few words here and there to get it up the rankings. The traffic driven by the story site links will help tremendously there, too. SEs recognise existing traffic as well as optimisation.

I took a look at the source code, and I have to say that there is more to SEO than using CSS. I think the meta tags and title could be more keyword focused, and that's for starters. Try to bold a keyword here and there in the text. If you don't want it to look bold, then just set the CSS for <b> to something like font-weight: normal; . Link building is also very important. There is a lot to learn about SEO, and unfortunately, it changes frequently. As for code being in the public domain, I was under the impression that code is intellectual property. At the very least, don't let anyone catch you obviously ripping code. That will really foul your reputation fast.

[horney]

Thanks for the help, odysseus, and, like the others, for taking the time out to post very comprehensive responses.

I have decided I like the free site model, going from your specific example and some of the links. That's where I started off, too, but got diverted! I may well give it another try.

By the way, I am in no way understating or underestimating the amount of work which is needed for successful SE rankings. A flick through some of the pages and tutorials here offers some indication of what's involved. I've been through that several times for non-porn sites and it's always a work in progress, never a finished job. All I was indicating was that I am prepared for that stage, Deciding on the words for titles, descriptions, keywords and content for pages will be determined to some extent by my final decisions on how the whole thing hangs together. Hence that side of things hasn't received full attention yet, but the structure is deliberately designed to facilitate that stage.

One thing to watch out for: the SEs are always looking for ways webmasters are trying to trick them. I've always found it better to ensure the keywords fit naturally into the flow of the content without "enhancement". I don't twist content to match keywords.