http://www.straightalk.biz

Introduction

Mr. Flecha from straightalk.biz requested an analysis mostly to decrease his bounce rate. Now what is a bounce rate? A bounce rate is a measurement of the pages/time people spend in your website. The higher the bounce rate, the fewer pages people are visiting and the less time they are spending on your site. A LOW bounce rate typically means people are digging through your site and are actually interested in your content (I am only assuming it has a direct relationship with interest in your website). 99.9% of the websites online should desire a low bounce rate. The only exceptions are those that want to only boost their Alexa rank, which becomes less and less popular every day. So let’s go ahead and take a look at the site to see if some improvements can’t be made.

Presentation

You obviously have a lot of information you want/need to get across to people. When I first come to the site, I imagine you teaching a seminar about the proper amount of characters and bold words to maximize SEO. This observation is where we separate the coders from the designer. You are obviously a coder. I didn’t draw this conclusion from the content of your site, but from the simplicity of design. The first thing I see when I go to your site are lots of words. I am totally overwhelmed by words. Let’s consolidate and start to build our hierarchy.

What do you want people to know?
Upon my first visit, the first line that caught my eye was: “The focus is not hosting sales, making you a reliable website with Speed Optimization, Code Validation, & SEO is the focus.” This needs to be changed and shortened. You aren’t telling people what EXACTLY you are trying to sell/share, but instead spotlighting what you aren’t trying to sell/share. Not only that, but the word “focus” is a bit redundant.
Consider using something like Speed, Validation, & Rank is our mission… something like that. Then maybe have a subtitle saying “Straightalk Website Optimization.” Or flip it - have the bold phrase as the subtitle? Up to you. Either way, people visiting your website will not be interested if they do not get instant gratification; which is another loop that can hinder progress in the web development world. Americans love fast food. Why? It is as close to instant gratification as you can get. That is the perfect business model - give people what they want and give it to them as fast as possible, while minimizing sacrifices.

How can you inform people?
Maybe the best transmission of your information isn’t through endless text, but through visual instruction. Maybe text is the optimal form of information transmission. What I want you to do is put yourself in the shoes of a potential client/visitor. He/she found your website from Google and is wanting to search for a particular article… quickly. Your search function is in the very top-right corner of your page - a great spot to put it… however, you have to click a button to get to it. Why not have just a standard search? Will having an incredibly advanced search help that much? What if you had the simple search on the front page, but the advanced search as a link below the text box? At the moment, I don’t really know how to find relevant information on your website.

How quickly can they access the information?
I kind of digressed into this topic in the previous question - but I’ll address it anyways because I want to talk about your Navigation. Your Navigation confuses me. The first link is “WHY SHOULD YOU?”
Why should I what? And why are you yelling?
Come up with shorter and more descriptive titles - oh, and lower those caps! You have “SUBMIT CONTENT” - submit what and why should I submit? Consider redesigning your menus with a plus/minus sign to expand a sub-menu. Maybe have the title “Submit,” and when you click the plus, it drops down “Articles” and “Polls.”

Why should they access your information?
What do you have to offer? Present this on the front page and make it obvious.

In my honest opinion, the whole website needs to be redesigned. I think you have a lot of information to get across to people. You have so much potential with the user-submitted content. There is a lot to be said about a site that can offer a dynamic resource from hundreds and thousands of opinions of SEO and web optimization. No one has cornered the idea-compilation market and I think this site has the capacity to finally put the final stone in the building. The design needs to be leashed, though! It needs to be brought under control!

At the very LEAST, get rid of that smiley at the top-left of your screen. It doesn’t make your site look professional.

I have another site that you may want to look at. I created this site as an experiment to see if people liked blogs over static web pages. Look at the usability and design of Making Adcents and take some notes. Also note that I didn’t market, update, or do anything but make a few basic pages for this site (which is why it has 0 PR). I just want you to see proper uses of graphics on a front page. You don’t have any graphics - which really takes away from the site. If you are selling CMS plans, consider making your front page look like a hosting site’s:
vizaweb
GoDaddy
etc

On another note, the phrase “FREE FREE FREE” is often associated with spam and/or malware. You may want to consider changing the heading of that link section.

Oh yeah, and your forums are unusable. Implement something like PHPBB or vBulletin.

My main impression is this: you spend so much time talking about how you aren’t selling your services like a hosting company. You want to be successful like those large companies that are real pushy about sales… so if that works, why don’t you do it? I’ve said this before and I will say it again - do what works! If being pushy about sales works, if stretching the truth to work in your favor (while still being honest) makes a profit, do it! Push sales. Show how awesome you guys are! Be honest and straightforward with your prices and customer service - the business will typically harvest itself!

Enough with Presentation.

Technical

You have all of the meta tags.  That’s good.
It all works…  but it isn’t really usable.

The key to understanding isn’t in explanation.  It is in making everything painfully obvious.

The Lo-Down
-Work on the following:
Design
More design
Even more design
So much more design
-Navigation is unidentifiable
-Need images
-Get to the point!  People don’t want to read so much!
-The more professional it looks, the more customers you will receive - so remove that smiley at the top-right of the page!
-Fix forums to make them more usable
-Fix search
-Add more color
-Fix the catch-phrase

Conclusion

This site has such bland design.  I think there is some great information that you need to convey, but the design is hindering it all.  Imagine yourself as a potential client visiting the site - an average person.  What would that person want to see?  What do people enjoy seeing?  Do they want to see miles of text?  They probably want to get right to the point.  That is what the current problem is - it doesn’t get to the point.  Bounce rate has an indirect relationship with professional design - the higher quality of presentation, the lower the bounce rate.   Right now, the design quality is seriously lacking and needs some massive improvement.  Maybe add in a logo, some images you create (that actually blend with the site - no forum smilies).  I think this scratches the surface of the effect these suggestions have on the site… or in other words, I think this will greatly help your site.

Main Hindrance Factor: DESIGN!