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Could you guys please review my start-up/website(exaggerated.com)? (exaggerated.com)

8 points by NathanC ↗ HN
I have worked hard on the site (over a year and a half of development)- I have not promoted it yet, and it has remained fairly confidential so far.

I have struck a deal with a content provider, and I am now working on optimization to fasten the loading of the pages.

I have fully funded the site so far.

What do I do now ? please advise... I'd like to draw more traffic. should I promote the site with ads ? launch a thread on reddit ? ask each and every blog design to talk about my site ?

cheers Nathan

6 comments

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NathanC
I have fully funded the development of the site so far. It was launched a few weeks ago and has not been promoted yet, so it is still fairly confidential. I am now working on optimizing the site to fasten the loading of pages.

It's a lot of work by the way (over a year and a half of development.)

I would like to draw more traffic. What should I do from now onwards ? buy ads ? launch a thread on reddit ? ask each and every design blog I know to kindly talk about the site ?

I'd love to have some piece of advice from your community

cheers, Nathan

cubicle67
It looks really polished. the work you've put into it shows.

I think you'll find people love/hate the design, but you can put me in the 'love' side. that goes for the image in the footer too. Did you do all your own artwork?

Only question is, I'm not really sure what I'm supposed to be doing.

oh, who wrote all the articles? Can't see a byline on them. Surely not you (based on the amount of work required)?

NathanC
many thanks for the compliments.

The design was done by Julien Morel,(joolz.fr), the same guy who did the previous design of Matt Mullenweg(http://ma.tt/). he has done a lot of great design for a few french sites as well. You should check his portfolio. He is a nice guy. He is now working on a costumed page for my twitter account (@exaggerated_com).

Content creation has been a nightmare to produce this far. Spotlights are easy to generate, cause they are aggregated live in our admin database and are all pre-populated.

Original content however is something really difficult to produce on a daily basis. I had a redditor to produce the articles, I used to pay him like 800$per month. but he cashed in the money before xmas and never re-appeared... I have just found a great content provider now who is charging me 5$/article.

Definitely creating a startup has been hard as hell!

I am a private banker/ portfolio manager in Geneva Switzerland. I founded the site just for fun during my spare time.

glad you enjoy it.

revorad
It looks awesome but is really slow. Speed is King for the success of a site like this. See Reddit, HN, Facebook...
NathanC
you are right. speed is my main focus right now.

I am introducing sprites everywhere, and implementing a lot of optimization tricks.

tsycho
The article links on the right are scrolling down too fast. A couple of times by the time I read the headline, and was ready to click, the article was gone. I didn't see an obvious way either to go back to something that just went way.

You could add a freeze button, or a scrollbar to see more history.