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Critique My New WPMU+Buddypress Website!

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Okay, its almost 110% complete, please let me know what you guys think so far!?

http://www.thecleanpost.com

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 23:59:21
  • -
    • New Recruit

    Congrats on the launch of a new site!

    I’ll leave it to others to comments on style and content. I’ll focus on this:

    I assume that since the site is new, it has very little if any traffic to it yet?

    Despite that fact, it is very, very slow. No one is going to actively surf a site that takes so long to load. Your bounce rate is going to be near 85%+ and your recurring rate is going to be .05% if you’re lucky.

    I would strongly suggest you upgrade the hosting on it considerably. WPMU is a pretty intense architecture, and requires significant resources thrown at it to function well. If budget is the issue, start with ram, as those upgrades tend to give you the most bang-for-the-buck on database driven sites. Disk speed etc. can also make a big difference, but give you way less of a performance advantage / $, especially on WPMU sites.

    Along with hosting, I’d also clean up some of the actual page elements that are slowing it down as well.

    I ran yslow on it, and the results were pretty tragic: 17 stylesheets, 11 external javascript files, etc.? That needs fixed.

    After that, you need some sort of server-side caching mechanism. wp-super-cache or whatever other solution floats your boat.

    I don’t mean to sound critical, but I know how much work it takes to bring a new site online, and hate to see someone set themselves up for disappointment due to things that are easily correctable.

    take care and best of luck on your new project!

  • vivid2k
    • Design Lord, Child of Thor

    I am very thankful, thanks guys! Well today we reached about 2,000 hits from a email blast and 62 signups.

    As for the slowness……hmmm its on a dedicarted server along with http://www.truckmountforums.com from Hostgator.com with 6gigs of ram.

    About the fixes, this is my first wpmu site, if one of you guys could fix ALL my errors that would be awesome and shoot me over a good price since im hurtin right now to admin@thecleanpost.com haha :slight_smile:

    thanks guys keep it coming!

  • maisapostas
    • Flash Drive

    I don’t like the design, you don’t make any modification on the template, its the bp-corporate with a bunch of banners…

    You realy need to improve if you want to have a success site.

    (You ask for an opinion, nothing personal :wink:)

  • georgef
    • The Incredible Code Injector

    I like it. You’ve done some great tweaks to that theme and your design and layout is clean, easy to navigate.

    Only thing I would have personally done a little different is stretch the main header a little longer and maybe blend it in a little more into the site.

    But that’s just personal choice.

    How did you change the buddybar at the top? It looks really good and trying to do the same thing..