cartess3 — Tue, 25 Nov 2003 21:42:42 +0000

Overall I think your site looks great. Lots of text, which is something I really like. The only thing I'd really modify at this point is the navigation menu at the top. Some of the links are on one line and some take two lines. I'd try and shorten a word or two in an effort to get everything on one line.

my .02 cents worth though

FoundHost — Sat, 22 Nov 2003 03:31:58 +0000

Hi Vic, I just took a look at your site.

I guess all the hard work to make the site load faster really paid off. It loaded very quickly, great job!

You might want to say "Advertise" in stead of "Travel Providers". I was expecting to see a page of links, not advertising information.

I think you have a great site, and idea for a site. How long did it take you? I camp all the time so I will definitely keep your site for our next trip.

Great job!

yaa.info — Tue, 18 Nov 2003 23:22:20 +0000

i think the site is immaculate from programming point of view, but you really need to work on load times. on T3, it would take a few seconds for some pages to load. you might want to spice up the menu on the top a little bit. the font looks dull and too standard. you might even want to use small gifs (400 bytes each, wouldn't add to much to the page). some tables don't match (different cellpadding). the discaimer on the bottom is taking too much spend, u might want to consider a link there.

e_t — Mon, 17 Nov 2003 19:08:58 +0000

I think you have to much different colors (on a top of text font and size)
Home page blue on a left v.s. yellow on a right – is a bit annoying.

“Travel Providers” and “About us” links confused me because on a “Travel Provider” it still says “about us”)

then on some pages you move nav bar to the button (or main nav bar on a button when different bar on a top) – it’s confusing

from a home page click on “Groups” ander “Life Styles” on your left: notice how much space is wasted by showing on what page you are (white block under nav bar)

Regards
e_t

dhotchin — Mon, 17 Nov 2003 14:10:19 +0000

tsnyderawt what sort of coding did you use to track what speed you site was loading?

Busy — Sat, 15 Nov 2003 08:32:05 +0000

Just making those images into thumbnails would drop the load time heaps.
I have a bad connection at the moment so will check later, but just remember a lot of us modem users, even thou we have 56k modems only connect at 14-36 speeds. mine at the moment is acting like 14.4.
Also when checking your loading time remember you're probably viewing the cached version (you and your isp cache sites) so get a friend to check it. Opera browser is good to check load time as it tells you under the address bar, images loaded, load time ...

tsnyderawt — Fri, 14 Nov 2003 23:21:18 +0000

Thanks for all the helpful thoughts, suggestions and advice. I was really impressed with how much time people took to check out the site and how deep they went.

I didn't realize how slow the site is. For the past three years I've been on a DSL and have just gotten used to 'instant' pages. I'm not even sure I know how to connect by modem anymore.

So taking the constructive criticism of the site's speed to heart, I spent over 20 hours building code to track page load times and visitor connection speed. I was really surprised to see some pages taking over 8 seconds to load - on a DSL. That clearly is not acceptable even for me.

As far as visitor connection speed, I was amazed to find that people really do still use 28.8 modems. I thought that was part of the 15th century BC or something. I noticed over 25% of visitors to the site were on 28.8 connections and more than 50% on some form of dial up modem.

I was horrified to realize how long visitors would have to wait to download pages that on a DSL took 8 seconds. Clearly that was not going to work.

It seems that the speed was most affected by the number of hits per page as defined by the number of javascript, css, and image files per page. Each of these 'hits' required the user's browser to download the file by first sending a request through the various internet hubs & routers to the server and then waiting for the file to snake it's way back to the browser.

I reduced the number of hits by a minimum of 8 per page. This alone dropped download time for the worst pages from 8 seconds to about 3 seconds.

Then I spent quite a bit of time looking for ways to compress the remaining javascript, css and image files. I can now download all pages at less than 2 seconds and a lot faster for most pages.

There is probably more I can do to fix the 'speed' issue and I'll continue to hammer away at it.

Regarding some of the other comments:
1. The site is much more than adventure travel. As the site's logo describes, "Life's An Adventure" and adventures come in all types from adrenaline bungee jumps to adventures in relaxation, romance, culture, etc. In this sense, the site has over 700 categories of travel services & ideas.

2. I never tried to mislead any one by suggesting the site was purely informational. As mentioned in the disclaimer at the bottom, ALL information on the site has been provided by the listing partners that advertise on the site. RealAdventures is not a travel agency, we strive to connect travelers with companies that provide various travel services. The site is not a personal website, it is commercial and in that regard is out to make money.

3. The site does truely get over 200,000 visitors per month and approx. 1.2 million pages. That is the truth. But I need to increase that traffic 10 fold before I can make a profit.

I thank every one that took the time to review the site. I'm specially thankful to those that took the time to provide valuable feedback.

If you get a chance, check out the improvements to the site. I'll check yours out if you wish.

dhotchin — Fri, 14 Nov 2003 14:43:55 +0000

I agree with the above. it is really slow. If you can speed things up abit, then to me you have a good site.

The Webmistress — Tue, 11 Nov 2003 09:16:04 +0000

Other than the points that Busy raised, I would centre the links in their boxes as they all look rather squashed to the side at the moment and you have a huge horizontal scrollbar at 800*600.

Maybe the main reason you aren't getting visitors sticking around much is the site is so slow and I'm on a cable connection!

Busy — Mon, 10 Nov 2003 22:23:46 +0000

Welcome to TWF and thanks for reviewing some other sites.
First up your site is very slow to load, at one stage it nearly locked up mozilla (firebird).
NEVER use the width and height tags to resize your images, you have over 100kb of images on the index page and that can take a while on 56k or less modem.

Don't mismatch fonts and links, try keep to one style of font throughout the whole site (logos etc can be different), and same with links, either use the same color and same text decoration (underline or no underline) as swapping confuses people and they wont know what is and what isn't a link.
IMO you rely way to much on javascript, a lot of people these days surf with it turned off to avoid the pop ups etc I turned it off and was still able to surf your site (good thing the sitemap link was there).
Why are you using meta tags to set cookies?

There is a lot of information/topics on there but after trying to find out how to submit a site to your listing feel your aiming towards money rather than factual (been there done that kinda thing). I was put off by this so would of stopped viewing there.

Do yo have two web sites the same? realadventures and atlastravelmarketing ? search engines can see this as spamming. your faq page refers to "AtlasTravel" while your link wording and disclaimer refer to "realadventures" - comes back to a matter of trust. people get scammed and spammed so much on the web you have to earn their trust.
Advertise page - don't lie, again trust. you state # Over 200,000 visitors per month
# Approximately 1.2 million pages/month
# Resulting in over $3m of business for our clients per month but above you state traffic is slow.

So your travel advice, your reccomend links etc are worthless without trust, sure make some money with the site but do it in a way people know you are, even a "paid listing" next to the paid ones would help.
Tourists and travellers need a lot of help and if your site is helpful the word will get around but try trick them or lure into a money making scheme and it will bite you in the butt - this coming from a traveller.