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Please appraise my News aggregator website

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Hi guys,

I have been working in the last week to create this news website. It has a classic newspaper look. The theme is bought from Themeforest.net.
I am seeking feedback about the website and it's potential value as a developed domain name.

The domain name itself was approved at SquadHelp, but I withdrawn it since after 6 months it wasn't sold so I decided to develop it.

What the site is about ?

Will give you news from more than 50 countries from all over the world. News in that respective language. You will find a filter on the top by country and choose what you like, for example:
- https://topeditions.com/country/us for United States
- https://topeditions.com/country/ca for Canada

This is a news aggregator website retrieving news through API. It has more than 100k news in the system, so that means more than 100k unique links which are groing daily with ~2000 - 3000 news per day.

Features:
- Comments system;
- Views system to show you the top viewed news in your country or globally;
- SEO urls;
- Invisible recaptcha for form submits;
- Gave opportunity to people to share news via Facebook or Twitter for more exposure / traffic

Example of news from US: https://topeditions.com/country/us/...itness-will-detail-trump-s-abuse-of-power-cnn

Example of an author page from the United Arab Emirates: https://topeditions.com/author/Www.wam.ae

Example of a search page: https://topeditions.com/search?q=trump

I know that the site loads slow for whatever reason, will try to improve that, also I am in the process of creating the Facebook and Twitter links.

Thanks,
Cristian
 
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The views expressed on this page by users and staff are their own, not those of NamePros.
Awesome site!

As you mentioned loading is slow.

As for a suggestion, if possible, would be to categorize the stories. For instance it went from the recent Califirnia school shooting to a Fortnite gaming article. Two completely different interests, yet grouped together.

Nice work! Great site build! Great domain as well!
 
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Slow is an understatement, is the site down? Ive used alot of themeforest templates, normally stick to something like the7 and only use necessary portions, or boiler theme like generatepress for bit more custom light weight work.
 
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504 Gateway Time-out.
Doesn't load, zero stars.
 
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Getting '504 Gateway Time-out' error
 
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He might be working on it now, is not loading for me but did few days agö
 
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Thanks for The opinions guys, Yes... Iam still working on it, i am trying to improve the loading time so expect downtimes and slowness în the next couple of weeks...
 
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Tutorialindex.com is awesome. Look forward to checking the site when it's working better.
 
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Thanks @mr-x
I will post an update in here when it will be fixed
 
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Over 200k news în the System from 50+ countries în their specific language at the moment.
 
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Great idea, and good site. I just hope you won't burden it by adds in the future. One thing I don't like is menu; submenus open at mouse hover; if I accidentally move mouse out of submenu area, it closes, so I have to start again.

What I want to say, if you want to open, let's say, Mexico, you need to hover to menu "K-P", and from there you have to carefully move mouse to the right to "Latvia", it is the only item that shares border with its parent item; if I move mouse a bit down, it switches to menu "Q-Z", and if I move it a bit up, menu closes, and you have to go through that again. Actually, if you try carefully, you will see that mouse pointer needs to move through bottom about two thirds of the border between "K-P" and "Latvia" - if you move mouse through upper third of that border, menu will close anyway!

I prefer menus where you need to click, and it remain open untill next click, regardless of mouse movement in the meantime. But it's subjective opinion. In mobile, menu works fine.

I would recommend getting few more filters, i.e., menu categories, in addition to countries:

Language - I guess majority of users look for news in English language, and those news come from many countries; the same might apply to some other languages; do you have possibility to tag each API source according to the language it uses? Or some sources have news in different languages?
And I'm not sure if it should be menu category, or filter, as I mentioned; for example, you provided link to search results for "Trump"; first and third result in that search, at the moment, are in Turkish and German language, which is not of much help to many readers; so, I would like possibility to search for "Trump" in English language, i.e., whatever term in whatever language.

You might want to integrate Google Translate to your site, so those who are keen to read the news in foreign language can get the grasp of what it is about, although GT is not ideal translator.

Category - e.g., Sport, Economy, Politics, Science, Culture, Entertainment, etc, may have subcategories, obviously. Again, with possibility to display only desired language.

You might also like to add most used countries directly to menu; for example, to get US news, one needs to scroll through two menu levels; if US news is amongst most visited countries, add it directly to menu.

The same applies to trending keywords at some specific time; "Trump" or "Trump impeachment" is probably on the top now, so it merits its own menu item; similar for "Australian Open", "Superbowl", "Nobel prize", etc., when it's about time for those events. To achieve this, you need to tag posts, I don't know if your API offers that possibility.
 
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A screenshot to explain my issue with menu:

TopEditions.jpg
 
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Hello @strugar

Thank you for the very detailed review. For the menu, I will try to resolve this situation, it is rather odd, I have tried it myself as well.

For the categories, I know this is really important and I will have to try to figure out to look for certain keywords in the news in order to create them, as the API that I am using, does not retrieve categories.

I will also have to create an advance search where you, as a user, can have more filters, for example as you said, if you search for Trump, it will have results in turkish or any other language, but not from US. Will create more filters in which when you search, you can select the country as well in which you want to search.
The search right now is a full text search mode, so it will give you the best results sort by relevancy.

Thank you,
Cristian
 
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Over 400k news in the System, i know the search is not great yet, still working on better categorization...
 
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Hey guys, here are some improvements:

- Advanced search added to the site ( https://topeditions.com/advanced.html ) - if you have any suggestion about it, I am open to ideas.
- Also by demand, I added a section in the menu with Popular Countries, which is a significantly smaller list of countries that in my view are popular ( please let me know which are the most popular countries in your view )

Thanks,
Cristian
 
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I’m going to give you some honest feedback...

The api is only pulling the first paragraph typically. Not the entire article.

Even if it pulled the full article, it would be duplicate content. It doesn’t matter if the site has 30,000 or 3 million articles ... if it’s not original content there is no value there.

Anyone can buy a newspaper theme and install an aggregator plugin.

You’re not going to get organic traffic this way if done correctly (most aggregator plug-ins will attribute the original source) because Google will not index it.

The time/energy/effort to do this could be better applied at building a site that you can turn into an asset.

Just my 2 cents...
 
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I’m going to give you some honest feedback...

The api is only pulling the first paragraph typically. Not the entire article.

Even if it pulled the full article, it would be duplicate content. It doesn’t matter if the site has 30,000 or 3 million articles ... if it’s not original content there is no value there.

Anyone can buy a newspaper theme and install an aggregator plugin.

You’re not going to get organic traffic this way if done correctly (most aggregator plug-ins will attribute the original source) because Google will not index it.

The time/energy/effort to do this could be better applied at building a site that you can turn into an asset.

Just my 2 cents...

Thank you for your feedback.
It is normal for an API not to give you the full content, why would it do so ?!

The application is custom coded, there is no cms / plugin involved. ( https://whatcms.org/?s=topeditions.com ). I just like to develop stuff :)

I had the domain and I put it to good use as the name suggested TOP Editions.

Thanks,
Cristian
 
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More than half a million news indexed in the database. I know it is duplicated content as jonathan said in the previous post, but still, it is a one stop search of various news sources. Just like a rss feed reader, same principle.

To be more specific about stats:
- News: 514,692
- Views of all news in total: 113,532

Thanks,
Cristian
 
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Link to the news source should be obvious and there, because it's ethical and useful.
 
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Link to the news source should be obvious and there, because it's ethical and useful.

Hi, the link is present, check any news post and you will find a read more link that contains the original post.

Thanks,
Cristian
 
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The site looks good. It may make sense to add automatic country switching. For example, if a user lives in Germany, he immediately sees German news. Without using the menu. Node.js has modules that can identify a country by IP address. I am sure that in python and php there is also something similar. Users are lazy. Especially new users. They look only at the main page and then leave. I also noticed that the favicon is not displayed on the site.
 
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Thank you for the idea @aelko it's actually a really great idea, I did not thought of it so far. I will try and implement it in the following week and let you guys know once it is done.
 
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Hi cipcip, nice site with a great set of features for the users to chose and pick.

incorporate the country suggestion by Aelko even it it takes more development and money to do, it would be a neat feature.

Otherwise nice use of images to your stories, and nice big headlines which stick out.

Well done cipcip
 
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The site looks good. It may make sense to add automatic country switching. For example, if a user lives in Germany, he immediately sees German news. Without using the menu. Node.js has modules that can identify a country by IP address. I am sure that in python and php there is also something similar. Users are lazy. Especially new users. They look only at the main page and then leave. I also noticed that the favicon is not displayed on the site.
i concur, otherwise excellent website. congrats!
 
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