HauntWorld.com Updates and Improvements

[Karl Fields]

While you're making changes ...

Hey Larry,
A pet peeve of mine, from the git-go, has been those pumpkins on the forum home page. They are the same, whether there are new posts or not in the category. Kind of funny if you go to the bottom of the page; shows a pumpkin with text "forum contains new posts" and an identical pumpkin with text "forum contains no new posts". I guess that way it could be correct either way

[mindtumor]

Is one of the major improvements you are going to make removing the huge banner from someone elses haunt from being the very first thing a guest sees when they click on your featured listing?

[krazedklownkilla]

Sounds great You will never go wrong putting money back into your product.

[drfrightner]

As always I reinvest profits and income back into the site itself... I'm making MAJOR sweeping changes to the site again to improve pretty much every aspect of the website.

Changing the state pages themselves so now the big map won't appear up there on say the Texas page... nor will the state listings just Texas stuff.

Also will add functions that show viewers not the top 10 most viewed overall profiles but just for say Texas, and most recent videos and photos just for Texas. All kinds of social media things will be added to the pages on your profile, profiles themselves will turn into mini toc pages for links to your photos, videos and more.

Everything will become MORE organized.

We will also build a landing page just for finding haunts so its not just the front page to find haunts, the haunt find page will feature all sorts of neat features and tools to help people find your haunts easier.

The blog on the front page will be moved up several inches higher, half those tiles are being eliminated and the TOC will be changed.

A new featured attraction page is being created so rather than that scroll on the front page a page will be created where all featured haunts from the magazine (front page) will be all on ONE page listed by state. Hard to explain but you'll see...

Anyway hopefully everything is done before March 10th...

Lastly, I have to say I wouldn't call myself an EXPERT but I would say I'm really close to an expert about SEO especially NOW! I've been learning more and more and more... I've recently hired a MAJOR SEO company to analyze and repair all the SEO issues with our sites. Work will begin this week and the investment is in the 5 digits. Keep in mind I've never really hired an SEO company, I've done pretty much EVERYTHING all by myself and I've driven this site up and over 1 million visits in October alone. Now by adding more firepower I think we can double the traffic with all the new things I've learned about SEO and things I just didn't know. I'm trying to promote haunts, and if I can spend money to do a better job I will!

Our goal is to DOUBLE if not TRIPLE our traffic NOW that we know we can handle the traffic...

Thanks to setting up Hauntworld on Cloud with Microsoft, we can actually run fast no matter how much traffic we get on the site. In the past days when we would do 40,000 in a day or more it would crash the site. Now this won't happen...

The state pages themselves will have load times reduced to under 4 seconds from 15 now... and much more.

Hard to explain everything just understand NOW THAT I KNOW we can handle ANY amount of traffic we can throw at Hauntworld.com we will GO AFTER the traffic.

Our goal in 2011 is to make the site very friendly to our users and double our traffic to our customers.

Again hopefully you'll see all changes made by March 10th, 2011.

As we get updates I'll post screen shots.

Thanks
Larry