Hi everybody,<p>my name is Darwin and I'm new to this community. Very excited to have found HN and have been following all the threads for quite a while before thinking of asking your advise.<p>I have a one year old baby and I'm concerned because he doesn't walk or talk yet, he's not social and not very active, the <i>big guys</i> like techcrunchie, lifehackerz or scobelicious don't want to play with him. we feed him regularly and he seems like growing day by day, but i guess we are concerned that he's not growing fast enough. And Oh, the baby's name is TripnTale.com<p>any tips on SEO, usability or marketing I can do to drive the awareness?
First of all, I love the way you posed the question.
Mine will be 1 year old soon, and i've got some of the issues you've got too.<p>First off, you are in a very crowded space as far as I can tell. I've got a very tiny bit of experience with PlanetEye, so I know a bit about the space that I think you are going for.... but that is the problem.
What are you going for? what are you REALLY trying to do? What is the differentiator. There are some really good trip planning/sharing sites out there, why should I use tripntale.<p>When I first hit your homepage I'm confronted with a big image and a sign-up, aka fail.
Below the fold you have images that link to trips.
I'd move those above the fold and make sure they are seen, and make them look more like links. Just a picture isn't good. Tell me where it is, maybe when the trip was, what user added it. That HAS to be above the fold.<p>Move the 'sign-up' stuff to a sign-up page. One button says 'click here to sign-up' that way you can give people more info, etc.
Move your searchbox up. top of the page would make sense, and the login stuff can probably go somewhere else.<p>Playing around for a bit, i just wasn't dragged into the experience. I can look at photo's but maybe there just isn't enough content or something. Not quite sure, but I'd say you have some product/UI issues to deal with first.<p>I don't think you'll get much major blog love until you get your usability figured out, and focus on the users first experience.<p>On another note, TC is not a marketing plan, and I can speak from experience. As great as it is to have a positive review from TC, it doesn't make your company, but it is a great way to get feedback.
There's a lot of room for improvement in your site's SEO. For example, the urls- instead of having URLs like <a href="http://www.tripntale.com/trip/4820" rel="nofollow">http://www.tripntale.com/trip/4820</a>, get some text in your URL, even something like <a href="http://www.tripntale.com/trip/mai-chau-vietnam/4820" rel="nofollow">http://www.tripntale.com/trip/mai-chau-vietnam/4820</a> would be better. Also, get some text on your pages! How can you rank in search without any text? If you do SEO
If you have any more detailed questions, feel free to contact me at the email in my profile.
Hey Darwin!<p>Send me an email (sean at chuwe dot com). We're a free advice site for small business and startups, and we'd like to talk for a small project we have going!