Credit Card Review Site

[pricj004]

Hi,

I'm new to affiliate marketing, so I wanted to get some objective opinions about the design, layout and content of my site (Credit cards, reviews and articles - iwantacreditcard.com.au)

At the moment, I don't have many cards listed (about 15 I think) but I'm adding about five a day.

I'd really appreciate some feedback on the design, any suggestions you have or tips for driving more people to click the 'Apply' buttons.

Many thanks

[Steve Steinitz]

Hi,

I think it turned out nicely. How often will you update the credit card info?

One minor thing, the evil bots will be smacking their lips at the naked email address in the contact link. I'd consider a contact form instead if that email address is at all valuable to you. I leaned the hard way.

Cheers,

Steve

[pricj004]

Thanks Steve,

I'll probably have to check the info on each card every couple of months.

The thing about writing reviews is that I'm committing to a lot of work, but I kind of enjoy it (at least for now, before the novelty has worn off )

Thanks for the tip re: the e-mail address.

[pricj004]

Ok, I haven't received much feedback.

I know credit card comparison sites are becoming a dime-a-dozen, so I'm trying to do something to make mine stand out.

I've now completely redesigned the site (if anyone tried to access it last night and it was down, it was because SQL Server decided to be funny about full-text indexing and I had to reinstall it - grrr!) - I've added a heap of features (forums, tools, comments etc) and changed the page layout and colour scheme. I've shifted the focus from a purely affiliate site to more of a product reviews/advice/articles etc site.

I've also decided I kind of enjoy web design - I coded the entire site manually (with the exception of the Captcha tool in the sign-up page) in ASP.NET. If anyone would like to give some feedback on the design, that would also be appreciated.

I've also implemented a contact form - thanks Steve.

Please check it out. Same link ... Credit cards, reviews, articles and advice - I Want a Credit Card

Many thanks.

[jam]

Its coming along very well, keep at t and you will do well.
if you do a few articles each week and market the website you should start doing well after a few months.

on another note, that 60 star looks familiar
I suggest you remove that, cause on your site it just says 60, no one knows what its referring to... also cause its just a copy from my site.

All the best with your site.

[pricj004]

Originally Posted by jam

on another note, that 60 star looks familiar

Hi Jam,

Thanks for your reply. The 60 came up on an image search and I thought it belonged to ANZ.

I'll change it tonight.

[pricj004]

Originally Posted by pricj004

I'll change it tonight.

I've made the change. The new image includes some text to indicate what it represents.

[leadegroot]

Suggestion - the onpage SEO could be better: Don't use db ids in your urls - add a column to the table for a short string that is unique to the record and use that in the url. Make the text hyphenated and its contents should name the card being reviewed.
eg /Card.aspx?CardID=6 => /card/anz-gold-visa/

[pricj004]

Hi leadegroot, thanks for your reply.

It's a good idea, but wouldn't I then need a directory structure like ./cards/anz/gold-visa/ , with the leaf nodes of every folder in that tree containing a card page? That would make updating a nightmare - if I needed to change the layout of my card page I would need to individually change dozens of pages.

That could be somewhat alleviated by using ASP master pages (which I already do), but again, if I decided to add a new place holder I would still need to change pages individually.

I could instead do something like ./Card.aspx?name=anz-gold-visa . Would that have the same SEO benefit?

I'm also conscious that I now have quite a few external links coming to my site and many of those links go to Card.aspx?CardID=x . I suppose I could simply test for a 'CardID' querystring and redirect, but I was under the impression Google didn't like pages that redirected?

[leadegroot]

Nah. you do it with rewrite rules.
Oooh, you're running IIS - I was going to give you the Apache solution as that is a far more common webserver.
I know it can be done under IIS, but I've never done it, myself - sorry!

Yes, generally Card.aspx?name=anz-gold-visa will give you the same benefit, with a slight loss of 'name=' being un-relevant.

If you redirect with a 301 (very vague recollection that the default IIS redirection is a 302, so be cautious) the value generally passes, and of course, future links will be to the better url

[newbie]

Originally Posted by leadegroot

Nah. you do it with rewrite rules.
Oooh, you're running IIS - I was going to give you the Apache solution as that is a far more common webserver.
I know it can be done under IIS, but I've never done it, myself - sorry!

Yes, generally Card.aspx?name=anz-gold-visa will give you the same benefit, with a slight loss of 'name=' being un-relevant.

If you redirect with a 301 (very vague recollection that the default IIS redirection is a 302, so be cautious) the value generally passes, and of course, future links will be to the better url

Helicon Tech - IIS modules and ISAPI filters for URL rewriting and search engine optimization will do that for IIS

[pricj004]

Many thanks for the suggestions.

I did some research on URL rewriting over the weekend and tried a few different solutions.

Initially I tried the built-in ASP.NET tool (useless).

Then I used a URL rewriter module (Open Source URL Rewriter for .NET / IIS / ASP.NET), implemented as an HttpModule, which worked well, however it did not allow extensionless URLs.

In the end I used Ionic's ISAPI rewrite (IIRF) - an open source alternative to the Helicon Tech module suggested by newbie above. It works really well and allows extensionless URLs and a regular-expression rules system.

I've changed all the URLs for the card reviews and articles and hope to do the same for the forums tonight or tomorrow.

Thanks again for the suggestion.

[newbie]

Originally Posted by pricj004

Many thanks for the suggestions.

I did some research on URL rewriting over the weekend and tried a few different solutions.

Initially I tried the built-in ASP.NET tool (useless).

Then I used a URL rewriter module (Open Source URL Rewriter for .NET / IIS / ASP.NET), implemented as an HttpModule, which worked well, however it did not allow extensionless URLs.

In the end I used Ionic's ISAPI rewrite (IIRF) - an open source alternative to the Helicon Tech module suggested by newbie above. It works really well and allows extensionless URLs and a regular-expression rules system.

I've changed all the URLs for the card reviews and articles and hope to do the same for the forums tonight or tomorrow.

Thanks again for the suggestion.

Aaaaah yes Cameron, you are right, but, if you ever get stuck with a regular expression that just will not work the way you want it to, the free support you can get from the russian guys will pay for that nominal licence fee ten times over.

[pricj004]

I'll brush up on my Russian

[newbie]

Originally Posted by pricj004

I'll brush up on my Russian

No need, their english is way better than our russian =))