The Great Traffic Experiment

Looks good at first glance. The site is doing a good job of explaining its purpose up front and getting the message across to the user (I think!). I think things could be a lot smaller and more condensed on the front page. You could make the logo and intro text much smaller and that way the navigation up above the fold. That way people will be able to jump in right away instead of having to scroll around to see what you have here.

I am a little bit confused about your testing grounds and why I should help there. I gather that you are testing out a variety of traffic generating programs to see which works best - that could be more clear in the intro text.

I like the short explanations you have on the content pages. That gives me a nice overview of what the service is and how they can benefit me. Longer reviews might be nice. THat way you could go into more detail about how the program works and what the pros and cons might be. Even with some of the services I'm familiar with here I noticed some key points that were left out (i.e. the problem with Amazon affiliates is that everyone knows their site, so why should they go through your link when they can go direct to Amazon.com? Google Adsense can be strict about requirements and aren't very nice to people who screw up somehow, innocent or not. It can also be difficult to get their ads to target right and the people who make the most money with them have to fiddle around a lot to optimzie click throughs.)

There is a lot of empty space at the bottom of those pages that should be removed.

I do enjoy the clean look and feel of the site here. It is a lot easier to read the content when there are so few distractions.

Good job overall.

Unlike Megan I believe your intro text is fake and misguiding.
I went to your site with an open mind and thought, great someone willing to help out newbies etc but then looked at your pages and this is really just another get quick scheme. most of the links are affiliate links so of course they are going to be good, and if they don't pay you I doubt you'd put them on.
You'll probably fool a lot of newbies with this, trust is a big thing.
The testing ground is just a page for you to display pop ups and get paid for pay for view ads.

You know a lot of these companies stat in the terms and service that this kind of thing isn't allowed.

As for the layout.
The pages are to long and spread out so you could put the boxs on the side and don't center your text on main content.
You are expecting more affiliate links and you have the code ready which is fine but comment it out as it's making the pages way to long.
A set of links at the bottom wouldn't hurt, either that or a 'back to top' link

End of the day it's a fancy affiliate link farm.

If you want to show some web credibility fuss up to what your doing (tricking people to earn you money) and donate ALL of the money you earn on your "experiment" to charity

I'm upset that you feel the site is "fake" or that it's a trick solely intended to make money. The idea was more to establish a mutually beneficial relationship with visitors; they would get information about services, and we would get referrals from the services that had referral programs. If you look through the pages, you'll see that we list sites even if they don't kick back money to us. None of the directories provide a referral service, nor do any of the content sites.

The referral links are the way we intend to make revenue; that way we don't have to gunk up the rest of the site with popups.

The testing ground was supposed to follow the same idea; it would be a place where people could opt to help us test popups and ads, so that we wouldn't have the popups anywhere else on the site. Contrary to your comments, Busy, the ads in there do no make us money. In light of the confusion, we'll probably just do away with the Testing Center concept alltogether.

Thank you, Megan, for your constructive feedback. We'll definately consider condensing the content on the front page. Busy, if you have any suggestions for doing away with the alledged "fakeness", we'd love to hear them; this is still in its infancy, and we want to make sure that the page is useful, not just a link farm. If we're coming off as fake, we want to fix that, as making a fake page is not what we're aiming for.

Thanks
Tom

To make it legite, remove all the affiliate links (you still have the google ads to pay for your expenses etc) or as said before give the proceeds to charity.

There are so many fake sites like this which are just affiliate link farms, not many people trust them, only the gullible and they usually don't return. If you are open and honest and give hard core facts people will return.

Sorry if I am harsh but I am honest. I say it as it is.

Umm I like the site don`t worry you`ll get over with it.

I don't know how helpful I can be, I'm fairly new @ web design.

Looks good overall, but you can minimize the amount of scrolling that people have to do by making the images smaller. Also, on some of the pages the link back to home page is very small. You might want to make it a little bigger.

Hope this helps.

alot of white space perhaps you want to place all the content in a border to seperate some of that white space and focus the users attention on the information. It helps if you properly color code the site removing large spaces of empty area and leaves a good impression on users.

Your site has a great idea, but I think there is way too much white space. It is spread out almost 3 pages down on 1024x768 resolution. frankly, most people won't scroll that far down no matter what.