Feedback appreciated on our free deals website

[iCodes]

We have designed and coded our own Wordpress plugin and theme to import the deals from our icodes service, and wondered what everyone thinks about it.

Demo sites
http://reald.co.uk
http://icodes.co

Download page for the plugin and theme
http://www.icodes.co.uk/tutorials/OiP+Simple+-+Official+iCodes+Plugin.html

Video tutorials from downloads, to installing to creating the website
http://www.icodes.co.uk/tutorials/OiPSimple+-+Official+iCodes+Plugin+and+Theme+Video+Tutorials.html

Cheers

Lee

 

[max99x]

if we're talking about the design of it.... it looks pretty horrible and dated

 

[iCodes]

Ah, thanks for your honest views, can you let me know some tips on how to correct that :

Does it help if the colours were not so bright? e.g. http://vouchercodefeed.co.uk/

Cheers

Lee

 

[DLOE]

As Max said, it looks very dated.

Not only the colours but also the layout.

Apart from the outdated design the website is quite difficult to navigate and the duplicate content(offers and codes), the missing content (store descriptions) and poor url structure will make it very hard to rank in a competitive market like discount vouchers.

Not sure how much time you have spend on it but if it was me I would start all over and take a look at what voucher sites look like these days.

Not trying to criticise your work, just some honest feedback.

Good luck

 

[iCodes]

No, that's perfectly fine, I have looked at other voucher sites and the only real thing which stands out being more 'in fashion' is the categories are more hidden and not on display, and they have chunky search boxes in the headers, and more cluttered of banners.

Regarding duplicate oontent, unless every voucher site re-worded all its codes and offers then that is always going to be the case, but how many unique descriptions can you make out of "Get 10% Off a £100 Spend" (but feed driven sites are always going to have that issue unless you hire staff to re-write 1000's of entries each day)

Codes and Offers are nothing more than ads, and ads are not meant to be used as content, the site is designed to be a tool to import these 'ads', and then the users are the ones who are supposed to build on them to make them unique.

I agree it does look dated, but not very dated, but I certainly can't see how its horrible, and navigation couldn't be simpler (mainly due to the out dated categories being on display)

Take a look at the most popular VC sites.. MyVoucherCodes.co.uk and VouherCodes.co.uk, to me they are very hard to navigate.

Cheers

Lee

 

[Adam H]

Take a look at the following, no need to browse through tones of categories if there is a search thats the main call to action.

http://www.vouchercodes.co.uk/
http://www.plusvouchercode.co.uk/
http://www.voucherbin.co.uk/
http://www.retailmenot.com/
https://www.couponcabin.com/coupons/
http://slickdeals.net/coupons/

They are all reasonably aesthetically pleasing or at least what you would expect to see from a voucher type site.

Although granted that took me a couple of searches to find those, a couple of years back there was armfuls of nicely designed voucher sites..............but that just hits home how hard most were smashed to bits because of thin, syndicated content. I believe Panda hit most of them back in 2013 and most ceased business shortly after because there was no going back on that business model.

Those that are still around evolved beyond what used to be the norm, as a data provider... to entice people back into that market and use your service you'll need to present what your offering better and think ahead of the game.

Its 2016 things have progressed.

 

[iCodes]

Thanks very much for that Adam, very useful, I can see what they all have in common (apart from voucherbin, to me that looks as dated as ours), they are almost designed like magazines, very busy looking with not much background showing, very flat designs (no shadows or shading), large search boxes, no sidebar categories.

I suppose they do look more professional so we will change our design to be more like that, but I'm still struggling to see why navigation would be better of those sites, they do seem to be designed to confuse or overload the users to click anything and everything with the hope of dropping as many cookies as possible, that's probably why they are still in business

Cheers

Lee

 

[iCodes]

I did notice on all those websites, the reason they are vastly different is they have very busy home pages, but as soon as you search for a store, ie PC World, the designs (below the header) are not a million miles away from ours.

Basically our website needs, cleaner header, better call to action on search, less noticeable categories, no shadows, much busier homepage.

Lee

 

[Adam H]

I think you probably need to spend some time researching what other sites are doing right and what people want/expect to see rather than using your opinion as a standing point.

Maybe take a look through competitors heat maps to get an idea of where peoples eye's are focused on when visiting these sites. You either have to create something unique that sets you apart, which i think you are way off doing atm or you have to understand what the top guys in the niche have done and why they've done it.............it means it works.

Although voucherbin isnt a modern looking design in the same respect as most flat type designs, they've gone with a vintage style quirky appearance instead but it is cosmetically pleasing to the eyes.

A great design will make the world of difference to your site, regardless of everything else.

References that may help :

http://peek.usertesting.com/
https://heatmap.me/

 

[iCodes]

Thanks again Adam, and I agree with everything you have said.

Our actual business is to provide an API and not really to supply the website to run the API, however to help out the smaller affiliates we have also decided to give them a starter website for them to build upon, However just because its a starter website we don't want it to be dated and look cheap (as it obviously does at the moment), we want it to be as good as a professional website because if they are making money then we keep them as a subscriber.

At the end of the day it is up to the end affiliate to create the 'out of the box' ideas plus upload the graphics, select the colours, add the banners, sliders etc (which is all done in the customize section).. because if we did it by default ourselves the website it wouldn't be 'out of the box' for very long as we supply the service to thousands of affiliates, big and small.

Since around 2013 as you say we have seen a drop in VC affiliates, so we do need to help out more where we can, and think of something out of the box for ourselves to get subscriptions back up.

Cheers

Lee

 

[Adam H]

Absolutely, To be honest i havent even looked at the wordpress plugin as your actual site didnt scream at me saying "come make a site with this it could be amazing".

If the wordpress plugin is done well enough, I would probably set up a couple of demo's, one with a nice looking themeforest theme using the plugin so at least people can see its easily implemented into their designs etc.

 

[iCodes]

Even as it stands now i'm sure someone with better design skills than us could do a much better job using the customization area, but if we can get the default layout to be up to date then it's obviously going to be a much better start for them.

It's difficult trying to come up with a good design when you are not a designer, you seem to be blind to what others are seeing.. bit like those who think they can sing in the X-Factor auditions haha!

Thanks for all your help with this, really appreciated!

Lee

 

[Edwin]

If your API is used by thousands of affiliates, aren't you big enough as an organisation to pay for professional design work?

 

[iCodes]

Someone mentioned "poor url structure", bit confused with that because as far as I can see it's identical to the url structure of vouchercodes.co.uk

The urls look fine to me, however the search urls don't look so pretty, but that's to do with wordpress.

e.g.

http://reald.co.uk/?s=pc+world
http://www.vouchercodes.co.uk/search/?q=pc+world

http://reald.co.uk/category/sports-and-leisure/
http://www.vouchercodes.co.uk/cats/sports-and-outdoors/

http://reald.co.uk/stores-with-codes/
http://www.vouchercodes.co.uk/all-voucher-codes-a.html

Lee

 

[iCodes]

If your API is used by thousands of affiliates, aren't you big enough as an organisation to pay for professional design work?

We are the largest deals feed provider in the UK and probably the US now, and just started in India (DGM India run that exclusively on icodes-in.com), however we are only a partnership, but this keeps the costs down enough for small starter affiliates to use it. If we start employing staff or outsourcing work then the prices would have to be increased to nearer that of formetocoupon.com ($1500 per month, compared to our $50 per month)

Lee

 

[DLOE]

Thanks again Adam, and I agree with everything you have said.

Our actual business is to provide an API and not really to supply the website to run the API, however to help out the smaller affiliates we have also decided to give them a starter website for them to build upon, However just because its a starter website we don't want it to be dated and look cheap (as it obviously does at the moment), we want it to be as good as a professional website because if they are making money then we keep them as a subscriber.

At the end of the day it is up to the end affiliate to create the 'out of the box' ideas plus upload the graphics, select the colours, add the banners, sliders etc (which is all done in the customize section).. because if we did it by default ourselves the website it wouldn't be 'out of the box' for very long as we supply the service to thousands of affiliates, big and small.

Since around 2013 as you say we have seen a drop in VC affiliates, so we do need to help out more where we can, and think of something out of the box for ourselves to get subscriptions back up.

Cheers

Lee

If your aim is to provide your subscribers with an out of the box solutions, why don't you team up with Couponpress? Their theme looks great out of the box and (I think) is already integrated with Icodes.

Offer your subscribers a substantial discount and let them subscribe via your affiliate link, win/win for everyone.

 

[DLOE]

Someone mentioned "poor url structure", bit confused with that because as far as I can see it's identical to the url structure of vouchercodes.co.uk

The urls look fine to me, however the search urls don't look so pretty, but that's to do with wordpress.

e.g.

http://reald.co.uk/?s=pc+world
http://www.vouchercodes.co.uk/search/?q=pc+world

http://reald.co.uk/category/sports-and-leisure/
http://www.vouchercodes.co.uk/cats/sports-and-outdoors/

http://reald.co.uk/stores-with-codes/
http://www.vouchercodes.co.uk/all-voucher-codes-a.html

Lee

That was me, Vouchercodes (and most other sites) have URLs like this:

http://www.vouchercodes.co.uk/boohoo.com

Where you have http://reald.co.uk/?s="boohoo.com"

 

[iCodes]

Yes such as Couponpress, Appthemes (clipper) already have solutions using our service, they do look great as you say, but not without their own problems such clunky unreliable importing, no categories at all (couponpress), no product images etc.

Also if someone has an issue it's much easier to sort out the problems they are having if we have also developed the script to run it, otherwise they get us saying the issue is due to a known issue of the script (which is out of our control), and the script coders saying the issue is due to us.

If we developed the script we can give it away for free without them having to purchase from a third party.

Our script import coding is much more reliable. The third party script coders arn't as familiar with our api as we are, so cannot do as a good a job. (but they do have the experience of better cosmetic design)

Also its better to give people more choices of scripts to download, keeps interest up and more varied websites.

Lee

 

[iCodes]

That was me, Vouchercodes (and most other sites) have URLs like this:

http://www.vouchercodes.co.uk/boohoo.com

Where you have http://reald.co.uk/?s="boohoo.com"

Vouchercodes.co.uk also has the same when using the search...
http://www.vouchercodes.co.uk/search/?q=PC+World

And we have such as..
http://reald.co.uk/50-off-from-pc-world/

... I can't see where vouchercodes.co.uk has a link to a single post in any url format.

The only major differences I see if that those website have a designed homepage, were as ours doesn't it just has the search type page layout. (vouchercodes.co.uk page layout after the initial search is no different from ours, just as basic and nearly as dated)

Lee

 

[DLOE]

Yes, they have the same for their search result pages but not the same for their static pages.