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Ask HN: How can I make this site better?

9 points by matthodan ↗ HN
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 useful, though I'm not sure what that entails. Any suggestions/feedback would be appreciated. Thanks!

15 comments

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lincolnq
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?
matthodan
Possibly, but Green Wedding Shoes, one of the more popular wedding blogs, gets over 45K monthly uniques and there are probably 5 other wedding blogs with similar traffic. I should be able to get more than 3K!
abbasmehdi
You really think women switch in and out of wedding mode over a short time period? You gotta meet my wife, our my cousins, or my female friends: they all have been interested in this since as long as I remember and don't see the fervor fading.
cdvonstinkpot
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?

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.

Other than that, my first impression is good- it looks classy, as it should considering the subject matter.

matthodan
Thanks this is good feedback! I def need to do a little work on the favorites.
PonyGumbo
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?
matthodan
I first made Knot News public last September, though I didn't really have a launch. I managed to get a handful of wedding blogs to post links to Knot News at the time, which is how anybody knows about the site. Today, most of the traffic I get is direct or from Google searches for "Knot News" or something similar. I've been trying to get all of the blogs that are covered on Knot News to link back to Knot News, but it's a slow process.
PonyGumbo
The wedding industry is huge - planners, photographers, musicians, florists, etc. If you can get these people to link to you, you'll start to do better in organic searches.
abbasmehdi
Try to get the Daily Muse to cover you.
dirkdeman
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.

Darren Rowse (www.problogger.net) has tons of resources and tuts to get more users. It's really worth looking into.

matthodan
+1 Just started reading, but looks good so far.
helen842000
I like the site! I agree, the wedding industry is huge!

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.

Are you aiming to attract the brides & grooms-to-be first or the wedding vendors?

It's the age old chicken/egg scenario when building a community!

chris_dcosta
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.

Think about what it is you can offer to encourage people to invite others.

But apart from that I like the way it looks.