Need A Reveiw: Unudub.com

[low2behold]

i designed this page with the city in mind... better yet... i designed this website with underground hip hop's urban culture in mind... i was wondering if theres something that can be improved upon... i cant seem to keep visitors... the website has been up since may 2006... so im not sure if its still too young to be recognized or if theres something thats not appealing to visitors thats keeping it from becoming a "hit"....

www.unudub.com

what do u think?
thanks in advance.

[Mania]

Well, I looked at the site for a couple of minutes and I had no idea what it was for. I was looking for a "about us" page or something to explain it all, but had no luck. I figured it offers some hip hop news and songs from wannabe artists in Philadelphia. I think you should simplify the content. For example, is your server info really something people are interested in? How about having just one poll at a time instead of three? Also I wasn't a fan of the colours. Or lack of them. I guess 'underground' is supposed to be cool and dark, but it is a little too grey for me at least. I think you maybe after something here, you just have to make sure everyone else knows what that is too. Good luck with it.

Edit. after checking again I saw that you shared some information about the site in the splash page. I skipped right past that (like most do). Lose the splash page and put the same info somewhere in the front page. If you wanna keep it, don't redirect it so fast. I wasn't even halfway through reading it when it redirected itself to the main site.

[low2behold]

thanks for the reply, i'll lengthen the redirect time to 20 seconds....any more advice?

[bldstr]

I agree with Mania and would advise you to drop the splash page completely. Have an intro on the home page with news/content below, you could easily make it look as attractive as the home page too.

There's a couple of technical details that I think just shouldn't be there:

"This site is best viewed at x resolution" - I don't know why people use this, most users won't know what their resolution is and they're certainly not going to change it for a website.

"Be sure to have Java enabled"? The vast majority won't even know what Java is never mind how to enable it...

Copyright info should probably be at the bottom of each page too rather than on the first page users see.

Once into the site it shows the server stats, once again people aren't really concerned that the server is running on Linux and using PHP and MySQL, it will be jibberish to most. This also takes presidence over the login/account creation box, which I have no idea of the benefits of or what it even entails.

The site is attractive and easy to navigate but you did ask for things which might be detracting people.

EDIT: Do you have any tracking enabled that will allow you to see how many people who visit the site actually go from the splash page to the home page without just wandering off elsewhere? I suppose it's not as straight forward as that as you have that auto-forwarding but they do say people will decide whether to stay or go within 4 seconds...

[low2behold]

thanks for that.