Thread: Americas-Best-Places-To-Retire.com

^^, Your website is nice... I noticed the footer section..."Don't just build a website, Build a website that sells"... It's your motive?... ^^, Do you think your site will Sells?

Thanks MOSpace!

I'm not quite sure what you mean by motive. I provide informational websites that I think will benefit my readers. I have to monetize those websites...it's how I make my living...it doesn't make the information any less credible. It's a program that has been very successful for me. I only promote products that I am willing to stake my reputation on.

I like the site layout. It feels user friendly. I have a question though. I am a little confused about the sites mission. Based on the title and url I thought you would be telling me where the best places to live in the each state rather than just a informative article about the State. For example like a list of communities or cities, etc. Did I miss something?

Not for me, looks like one of the first websites I built with frontpage years ago.

Very old looking style, buying is all about confidence and I for one wouldn't buy anything from your website. I don't like sites with google ads on, it just tells me that you are building the site to make money not offer a service.

I didn't notice that Michigan was included in the site. I would suggest including Michigan. Holland Michigan is a great place to retire. According to Money magazine it was the number one place to retire.

I agree with resale centre. Looks old

I like the design but I advise you to get rid of google ads, it makes the site less attractive.
Maybe also put some more pictures about the places you are discussing.

As far as I could tell this is a built-for-AdSense site, so taking out the Google ads would cut off the only source of revenue. Perhaps those ads could simply be repositioned to be less intrusive rather than taking them out entirely.

Something to keep in mind is that a large part of your audience is likely to be rather old given that this is a retirement site. I think an option to increase the text size would come in handy for some of your users.

Also, your navigation menu is made up of images, which could result in further usability problems. There is a little bit of a glow effect under the text when you hover over it, but is it really worth potentially sacrificing usability for some users over that barely noticeable glow effect? Plus, old people (again, under the assumption that your age demographics are shifted upward) are even less likely to see this, or appreciate it for that matter. Even if their vision is good overall, everybody's eyes take in less light as they age, and colors start to appear with a slight yellow tent (thus, your yellow-on-green glow effect is all the more likely to go unnoticed). Not being old is no excuse for not knowing a thing or two about usability for the elderly, especially if that's a big portion of your target audience. I'm only a teenager, but I learned the importance of paying attention to these differences across age groups pretty quickly after testing some of my own sites in the real world.

So change those menus. You can keep the background image, but make it a blank image and put real text on top of it. As an added bonus you'll reduce the number of images and total bytes to be downloaded. Then think about adding one of those text resize buttons.