www.riotcats.com - new site

[rspassey]

Hey all,

Sorry I haven't been posting much lately... I've been very busy with school and work.

One of my latest school projects in a self study class is to build and maintain a web community. With the assistance of word press, I have crafted www.riotcats.com (http://www.riotcats.com). A site dedicated to posting funny pictures of cats and kittens and whatnot.

The goal of the project is to maintain the site for the length of the school year, progressively increase in traffic monthly, abide by general coding rules, implement and modify php and html pages, and then begin to make a profit through advertisement networks (AdSense).

Basically, I would like a quick review of my site
If you see anything you think I should change, please suggest it.
If you see anything obvious that I could do to improve SEO / revenue, please say so.

I appreciate it guys.

Thanks,
Ryan Passey
www.riotcats.com (http://www.riotcats.com)

[TwoRails]

I gave it a quick look, but mostly for my own viewing pleasure. Your link above points to the last page, not the home page BTW. Who puts in the captions?

[rspassey]

Most of the images are captioned and utilized throughout other online communities I frequent, such as IGN. 4chan used to have caturday (and still might) where hundreds of captioned cat images would be posted. I contributed often, but most of the ones on my site will not be my captions. I am offering to either remove one's image or give credit to the person who captioned / took the photograph, if they admit to making it.

[faulkner132]

The site looks good. It's very easy to focus on the content you want people to see (the pictures).

I would suggest removing the internet shorthand on the captions. Unless your audience is primarily computer types, they are probably going to be turned off by "i has newb" and "im in ur forumz" for descriptions.

[rspassey]

Yeah, I've kinda been monitoring responses between proper grammar and internet chat for the titles. For the intended audience, short hand is more suitable, though there are already a few popular sites that do a similar deal with the cat macros and I don't want to entirely emulate them.

Thanks for the suggestions. I know it is going to be really tough to get a dedicated visitor base, but I have negotiated with the owners of a few sites that host similar images and they have been kind enough to let me utilize as many pictures as I would like. So now it is only a matter of how much free time I have before I have 1000+ pages of content.

[rspassey]

Any other suggestions?

I'm looking for a few sites like BlogMad that will help with some blog exposure - if you guys are aware of any others, please share - I've noticed that the more I post, the more traffic I get... but traffic also relates strongly with the number of inbound links I google is detecting (sigs in forums, etc.).

Thanks again.
My professor was quite impressed with what I have so far, despite the fact that a majority of the work was already hammered out by Word Press (but hey, no need to rebuild the wheel).