We put $200k into a site that sucks. Please destroy us with your criticism

Hope you don't mind me being frank, but you got screwed. Perhaps there's some complexity that I'm missing here, but this looks like maybe a 200-hour gig, so at 150 USD/hr (you can get real quality talent for that in the US), you'd be looking at 30k. Maybe more if you wanted to put extra time into the mobile experience, but I doubt you'd need more than 40 extra hours for that. Certainly not 100k worth of work here.

EDIT after reading more comments: looks like I did miss a lot of complexity. Still, it's hard to believe all that stuff was necessary. Need more content? Pay some schmuck $7/hr to make content (or outsource on Mechanical Turk, etc). Or stay extra-lean and do it yourself. Admin area? Probably don't need something terribly advanced. Caching? Not unless you're getting a ton of traffic, which it doesn't sound like you are. Wordpress integration? Doesn't sound terribly useful or relevant, but I could be wrong given that I don't know the target market (if there is one?) very well. Maybe you had tens of support emails a day asking for it - but I doubt it.

Thank you, we'll fix that!

Got it. It's OK to be honest that things aren't growing without feeling like the site "sucks".

Have you tried having a 15 minute Skype conversation with your 10 most passionate users? They can tell you loads about what they love/hate. You'll get some good clues about how to find more people like them and convince them to share it with others.

Hey! I just want to say, this is awesome and I wish you the best of luck.

I am a Developer and I noticed a few really concerning things in your CSS:

1. I believe you're committing the greatest CSS Sin: Emulating the DOM structure using nesting. Here is one example: "#site-header.newheader nav>ul>li>a.buttonGreen"

That CSS Selector should not exist like that. You shouldn't be using ids (first) and second this should be be: .buttonGreen {}

It looks like bad Sass or LESS is being used and nesting is being abused. If you'd like more advice on how to fix this I have written many talks.

The reason these selectors are a problem is because of the extremely long paint time. Right now your site takes around 30ms to paint. It should be closer to 10ms.

2. The CSS classes used are meaningless. Above there's a "buttonGreen" class. However, what if you redesign and that button is now blue? Do you just edit the CSS (like should have to be done) Or do you change your HTML and CSS to reflect a basic styling change? This only hurts you and maintaining your site.

3. You're loading 2.4 MB of data on your home page. 1 MB of that is images, which is fine, but that means you have 1.3 MB of data loading. The good news is that on mobile almost 100% of what you are loading are images, however, that number is still 2 megabytes. I'd see if there is a way to lower that number.

4. It is extremely busy. I was really confused when I got to the site. I am not a good designer so I cannot give specific advice, but I'd think "calming" the site would help a lot.

5. On Chrome Mobile I cannot click the hamburger button. It does nothing.

6. You need to simplify your creation flow. You have 4 pages right now, it should only be 1.

7. Your select boxes need a dropdown arrow.

8. USE NATIVE SELECTS and restyle them using CSS. Use a fallback for IE and IE only!

9. Mobile functionality is not the same as desktop functionality, this is a big one that needs to be fixed. You should be able to do the EXACT same things on mobile that you can on desktop.

10. The goal of the site should not be browsing, I don't think. I think it should be about: Creating lists and sharing lists. Browsing should certainly be an option, but make creation and sharing more prominent than browsing.

Technically the site seems just fine. For your $200k I hope it has a robust back-end, as unless I'm missing something, it's functionally simple.

Your mobile interface is good - needs a tiny bit of polish around things like the vote counts being cut off on the "list of lists" view. Your featured lists suck. Greatest presidents? What's the utility, other than "oh look"?

Find a niche and cram yourself in there, saturate it, then look at other verticals. Right now you're putting the onus on the user to find a use for your service. Don't make them think. Give them a use.

Given the extant decent mobile interface, and the general clumsiness/info-overload of the ilk of trip advisor, sculpting for travel lists might be a good niche to push into - best places to eat, stay, see, etc. Cheap to experiment with this and other verticals.

Anyway, that's my $0.02, and fwiw I've steered several startups (from a dev/consult for equity corner) to successful exits - just not my own!