I am looking for feedback on my tech and social media blog Technodope.com

• Wired TLD but with age and longer exp value, I guess good for SEO
• I thought my website was slow, but your one felt slower. I checked with GTMetrix, there too it scored in lower side. Its hard to browse around, site taking age to load pages..
• I didn't like the looks.. May be you should not have tried to force joomla to look like WordPress.. Give Joomla its own look and structure, I guess you may make it better looking.. This present one makes it look like 2005 type IBM or Microsoft MSDN librey documentation !!
• Your rankings are excellent, good alexa, but i guess with such amount of user engagement time, ranks can be better..
• As per alexa, your visitors like you, 7mins of site reading, out standing...
• joomla only reporting 2013 archives..

nothing much to comment, you are a senior and exp blogger, so best of luck sir..

Question..

• which plan of HostGator are you with ??
• what is your stats for the website ??

Thanks 

@NexGenBikes.com I agree with you as far as speed is concerned. I am using Hostgator baby plan which is a shared hosting plan. I have deployed most of the techniques that Pagespeed and Yslow suggests to boost speed. But I guess Technodope has now grown beyond a point where I need a VPS hosting. I am working on it and soon you will see a faster Technodope I have made few changes right now. Can you visit Technodope and tell me whether the speed has improved a little or not.

Regarding the layout of the site, I have always like websites with plain and simple navigation with a search box at the top. Like you said, most of the documentation websites such as IBM redbooks are similar with no text link or pop up ads. May be that led me to create this layout.

Technodope receives around 5,00,000 to 6,00,000 pageviews per month. I am not sure of the current data though. Feeling too lazy to login to cPanel and get the data right now . Will let you know later.

By the way, being a senior blogger does not mean I know everything. Thanks for your honest and valuable feedback.

Br,

Kahaly.

Looks..

This is more of a website rather a personal blog , so there what users prefer should be given priority over what developer would have wanted. As long as it doesn't effect the key structure..

Sorry for a negative comment, but  website looks simple in terms of design but clumsy in terms of so much stuff put together in not a proper order..

Other tech websites are evolving and this segment is highly competitive so i guess to perform one has to follow the stream 

Speed

Sorry, didnt notice any effect.. Website is in still slower side.

Hosting

I am confused.. May be joomla is less resource hungry compare to WordPress.. In my case, I am way lower than your stats with the USD 10 plan of host gator, yet receiving suspension warning due to high resource hungry nature ..

Question

How will you rate hostgator as your host..

Thanks..

@NexGenBikes.com Hostgator is good for shared hosting but when I move to VPS hosting I will definitely not choose hostgator. Their VPS plans are expensive and you will more with same $ else where. I choose hostgator in the beginning because I heard their support is the best and I don't regret choosing hostgator for the shared plan. Their chat support is the best in the industry. Most others provide support through ticket or forum.

Although you didn't see any speed difference the gtmetrix improved by 2% which is quite negligible. I guess I have to move to vps hosting after all.

Br,

Kahaly

Which VPS provider are you considering ?? and if possible please list why ??

@NexGenBikes.com I will go for knownhost.com. Their VPS plans are far cheaper than Hostgator. You get more for the same $. Check out the hostgator VPS plans and check knownhost VPS plans http://www.knownhost.com/managed-vps-packages.html. You will see the difference. Their support is pretty good. They provide support through system and the response around time is 2-5 mins which is not very bad.

Thanks for the info.. Looks promising VPS

@NexGenBikes.com You can try https://www.linode.com/ VPS as well. It is very good but it is unmanaged. That means you have to install everything right from the OS, php, database etc whatever your website needs all by yourself. All installations and updates has to be done by the user. They will just give you the server with root login.

Not possible, may be yes, if this would have been my only work, but as for hobby, it is not possible to stay in unmanaged

@NexGenBikes.com That is the same reason why I didn't choose linode VPS although it is cheaper and has better server config than Knownhost VPS. I want to spend my time writing fresh content, not managing and updating the server with patches.