Megan — Mon, 01 May 2000 18:24:00 +0000

I knew that. What I meant was that even with a specialization, he's going to have to do a lot better than this in terms of content if he wants to get regular visitors (ie. get people to go to Goodbookmarks rather than Yahoo's computer section or whatever). General directories have a lot more computer/internet content than this. With a specialization, there is an opportunity to do better and organize things in a way that is appropriate for the topic. The categories I suggested are just following the topics he's got on the front page.

Justin S — Mon, 01 May 2000 17:01:00 +0000

Just to clarify this Megan, I think jackchen's site is a Computer/Internet directory site only. At least that's what I remember his telling us before...

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Is this signAture short enough?

Darn- I can't even spell right...

Megan — Mon, 01 May 2000 15:52:00 +0000

Up front, you have to know that it is going to be very hard to compete with other directories. You're going to have to do some advertising as well as improvements to the site iteself. A couple of things:

Get a better logo and put it in the top left corner. The way you have it now, without a lot of colour and just in plain font, hidden between the navigation and search - people aren't gonig to notice it like that. They won't remember your name
read up on branding
get more content. People are going to use a directory to find a wide variety of resources. You need to have as much content as possible (ie. you only have one thing under HTML!)

Another thing that I think you should do is rearrange your first level headings, or providing a variety of ways to find resources. Maybe divide the categories you have into several sub-categories that will be easy for people to recognize right away (ie. create a section called media/Entertainment, and put magazines, news, music. The way you have it now I think it's just to hard to sort through to find what you want. If they were divided into categories, even if you just use those headers on the front page for organization, it would be a lot easier to find things. You'll get a lot of different visitors here - I'd guess that most people will be looking for entertainment, games, screen savers, stuff like that. All those categories like documentation, hardware, stuff like that should go in a separate section.

What I would do is divide those into appropriate categories, just for use on the first page. Have maybe three or four. Something like this: Entertainment (music, games, magazines, news, humor etc.), Your Computer (desktop enhancements, software, personal computers etc.), Web Page Creation (pretty straightforward - get rid of that World Wide Web and Internet categories - those are way too broad), one for industry professionals (employment, ethics, industry information, conventions and conferences etc.) and a final one for all that super technical stuff (Science and Technology Policy, Security and Encryption
Semiconductors). The ones at the top of the page should be the ones you expect people to be most interested in (the first ones I listed). Average people don't want to weed through all that super technical stuff they don't know anything about to get to the desktop themes they're looking for (or whatever).

[This message has been edited by Megan Jack (edited 01 May 2000).]

Justin S — Sun, 30 Apr 2000 17:17:00 +0000

1) Well the design doesn't have anything to do with getting repeat visitors. It's the content. So you need to ask yourself: why would someone visit my site instead of Yahoo or Altavista? If you can't answer that, then that's why you arn't getting repeat visitors.

2) I'm not going to comment on the design since it's exactly the same as it was the last time you wanted us to critique it, and obviously you won't change anything even if we say it doesn't look right...

------------------
Is this signAture short enough?

Darn- I can't even spell right...