

Ask HN: How can I make this site better? - matthodan

I created Knot News (http://news.knotist.com) in my spare time and the site has a very tiny but loyal following.  It gets ~100 uniques a day, of which ~80 are returning visitors.  I'd like to grow the site, though I think something must be missing since it isn't growing organically.  Perhaps I need to make it more <i>useful</i>, though I'm not sure what that entails.  Any suggestions/feedback would be appreciated.  Thanks!
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cdvonstinkpot
Being that I haven't added any, when I click on 'Favorites', it's empty. So
what if the site knew which pages I spent the most time reading, and those
were factored into suggestions for my favorites?

Then, when I was done looking at the 'Favorites' tab, it took me a second to
figure out I had to go to the left section of the top bar on the other side of
the search box and click on the title to get back to where I was when I began.
I was expecting there to be a way to go back to the front page in the group of
links to the right of the search box.

Other than that, my first impression is good- it looks classy, as it should
considering the subject matter.

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matthodan
Thanks this is good feedback! I def need to do a little work on the favorites.

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dirkdeman
I married a couple of years ago, and I remember there were a LOT of wedding
ideas sites on the web. Your site looks clean, the information is presented
well and I had fun reading, so no problems there. My guess is that your main
concern is being found, when I search for 'wedding ideas', 'wedding sites' or
'wedding blog' your site does not show up on the first page.

Darren Rowse (www.problogger.net) has tons of resources and tuts to get more
users. It's really worth looking into.

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matthodan
+1 Just started reading, but looks good so far.

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lincolnq
Um. Wedding blog posts aren't very interesting unless you're about to get
married or you're in the industry, right? Maybe your market is just too small?

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matthodan
Possibly, but Green Wedding Shoes, one of the more popular wedding blogs, gets
over 45K monthly uniques and there are probably 5 other wedding blogs with
similar traffic. I should be able to get more than 3K!

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abbasmehdi
You will, oh you will.:-)

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matthodan
<http://news.knotist.com>

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helen842000
I like the site! I agree, the wedding industry is huge!

I've been working hard to build up my UK wedding directory too and launched in
Jan this year. I have to say most of my traction has been through Twitter,
though I did get a lot of early e-mail registrations that I'm yet to target so
hopefully they will result in users too.

Are you aiming to attract the brides & grooms-to-be first or the wedding
vendors?

It's the age old chicken/egg scenario when building a community!

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chris_dcosta
I think it looks good, but to grow you need to do two things, get people to
sign up, and then get people to invite others to sign up.

Think about what it is you can offer to encourage people to invite others.

But apart from that I like the way it looks.

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PonyGumbo
When did you launch? Weddings are generally pretty seasonal, so I would guess
you'll get a lot more traffic in the next few months. Also, is anybody linking
to you?

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matthodan
I first made Knot News public last September, though I didn't really have a
_launch_. I managed to get a handful of wedding blogs to post links to Knot
News at the time, which is how anybody knows about the site. Today, most of
the traffic I get is direct or from Google searches for "Knot News" or
something similar. I've been trying to get all of the blogs that are covered
on Knot News to link back to Knot News, but it's a slow process.

~~~
PonyGumbo
The wedding industry is huge - planners, photographers, musicians, florists,
etc. If you can get these people to link to you, you'll start to do better in
organic searches.

