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!
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?<p>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.<p>Other than that, my first impression is good- it looks classy, as it should considering the subject matter.
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.<p>Darren Rowse (www.problogger.net) has tons of resources and tuts to get more users. It's really worth looking into.
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?
I like the site! I agree, the wedding industry is huge!<p>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.<p>Are you aiming to attract the brides & grooms-to-be first or the wedding vendors?<p>It's the age old chicken/egg scenario when building a community!
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.<p>Think about what it is you can offer to encourage people to invite others.<p>But apart from that I like the way it looks.
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?