Evan Carmichael reviews a Counter-Strike fan site and finds a cluttered homepage, broken images, and weak calls-to-action. He recommends better SEO, clearer navigation, stronger personal branding on the About page, and either removing or revitalizing the inactive forum to improve visitor engagement.
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Hi, it's Evan Carmichael. Today I'm doing another one of my Fiverr gigs where I review somebody's website, give my feedback on it, and showcase them on my YouTube channel. So today's website is servercs16class— clan.su. I checked it out. The website is not in English, and I said I'd give it a shot. So let's load it up and see what kind of feedback we can still give even though I do not understand what a lot of this wording is. So this is the website. Google lets me know that this is in Russian, and I'll probably translate it, but let's check it out first. The design is okay. There's a lot happening. I'm not quite sure where I should be clicking next. You might want to invest into having a slightly better design. That would attract people and quickly guide them to let them know what your next step should be. As I scroll down here, there's a lot of different pictures. Some of them seem broken, so no image here, broken picture, broken picture. Down the right side, there's a whole bunch more broken pictures, so you might want to get that looked at, see if these are important sections of your website or not, and clean up the, uh, fix up those pictures so that they can help the people who are visiting your site. So let's translate this and Google does not do a perfect job of translating but it's better than me trying to guess what all this stuff is about. So next I'm looking at the title tag of the page and it's All for CS 1.6. In general you want to try to optimize your website maybe a little bit more. Uh, that's probably not much of a search word, a search term, "all4cs 1.6," so, uh, be a little more descriptive in your title tag so that, uh, you're using your search engine keywords a little bit more. Here it says, "Download the materials on the site are for all users. This internet portal is designed specifically for fans of the most popular game of all time and nations, Counter-Strike." Now again, the English is broken here because Google is doing the translation. So this is your call to action, kind of explains what it is that you do. I would put this higher. It's not very visible, kind of gets lost in the shuffle. So if I landed on this website, I wouldn't quite know what you're all about. So I'd make this a little bit bigger, more visible, easier to understand. In terms of your, you know, call to actions, I'm not quite sure what to do next. Looks like there's a group here that's— looks like Facebook, but maybe it's like a Russian version of Facebook there. I don't see any newsletter or way to convert some of your visitors. So you want people who are coming to your website to not just come once and leave. You want to try to hook them. And so if you can sign them up for your newsletter, offer them some kind of bonus or free value add, and then when they, you know, they— you have some kind of new update on your website, you can let everybody know and bring them back to your website. So let's check out another page. Let's look at the About This Site here and see what we can find out. So again, I don't obviously understand what this says, but it's very condensed. That makes it really hard to read. It's good that you have some content here, but it's hard to read the font size and everything bunched together. Let's translate and see what we're talking about here. 36 tips while playing CS or Counter-Strike. So this is great that you're offering some value-add for people, these 36 tips, but what I would do is have a little bit more information about the site. You know, what are you offering here on the site? Why should people take that next step? What is the next step that you want people to take? So people are curious to know about your website and your business and why you got started, and so you want to use that as an opportunity and especially since it's the second link here on your menu. That's an opportunity to connect with people. Let's check out one more page to see our forums and see what we have here in the forums. So there's not a lot of activity. I don't even need to translate it to see there's only a few posts in general, and they look like they're from 2011. So stuff like this makes it look really dated and really old. And so if I saw this as your forum, I may not want to check out the rest of your page because it looks outdated. So I'd either remove the forum since nobody's really using it, or make this part of your business and really encourage people to drive, you know, to your forum and get them involved in it. And maybe that's something you put on your homepage, make it really visible. The next step is to, you know, join in on your forums. But one or the other, either remove it or make it more visible and really drive people to that page. One thing I see a lot of opportunity here is to tell your story. And so I haven't seen that anywhere. It's not on the homepage, it's not on the About Me page. Why did you start this? People are interested in learning about who the person is behind every business. Most people like to buy from people, not from companies. So if you could talk a little bit about maybe why you like Counter-Strike so much and why you started this website and what you hope to accomplish from it and what you want to share, that's a story that could really bring people in and make them want to take whatever that next step step is with you. Maybe make a video of yourself, or if you're not comfortable with that, just take a picture of you, you know, smiling or playing Counter-Strike or whatever it is, just to add a little more personal attachment than, than just what you've got right now. So hopefully that helps. Always a little harder when the website's not in English, but I hopefully there's still some valuable feedback in there that you can use to make this website even better than it is. For those of you watching, if you like this video and you found the information helpful, please give it a thumbs up below. It makes me want to do more for you. And if you have a comment about this website or you have a question about your own business or website, feel free to leave it in the comment section below. I always read those. I love seeing them come in. So thank you, and I'll see you on the next episode.
