|  timbury | Feb 1, 9:02am | | Wow, maybe this thread's title should be changed from "Please Critique My New Site" to "Rip Me A New A$$h0l3!" ;-) [dons asbestos suit]... |
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|  ben76213 | Feb 1, 11:02am | I think the design of ItsCasa looks great. But the total function of making a home page in another web site where you might need to log into is not really that nice...
This is in Opera from start, and Firefox can open many home pages at start...
Beside, if you want to share a home page with a web site.. It sounds as a big scam to monitor your visited sites on the internet.. I am sure that the owner doesnīt have the intentions to scam, but it is a very crazy site... |
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Sponsor |  digits | Feb 1, 11:32am | 10. ty ruben. if i had to go back i'd explode. [see next.]
11. yeah. i started getting embarrassed. ;)
1. without going back and from memory...answerman is right. it's code heavy and image heavy and google will have nothing to do with that to begin with.
2nd. If a human cannot understand it, neither will any crawler "get" what it's trying to do. in ie my debugger came up. in IE FOR THE LUVVA MIKE! ;)
3rd. Navigation is awful. This site breaks all the solid design rules as far as navigation, parsing *and* indexing. Sure. Rules are made to be broken but not at the expense of losing potential clients, users, surfers.
4th. Realism. It's not realistic to think any internet surfer is going to go there and spend the time we did in order to guess what the site is about. In the old manual "Web Pages that Suck" [circa 1997] Mr. Flanders would, indeed, term this: "Mystery Meat Navigation."
5th. No Terms of Service, Privacy Policy, or About Us in the least from the home page.
6th. See #1 through #5 again.
7th - Other things to consider [from #10], invalid CSS.
8th - SSL for user trust.
9th. - From Ben's perspective the idea behind the site is questionable to start with. Perhaps this may be remedied *with* a Privacy Policy and on a secure server.
I REALLY AM done now. Continue. I'll just watch and be quiet now. I really will. I just felt a concise page with the critiques may be more digestible. |
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Sponsor | | penman2 | Feb 1, 12:03pm | | 11: I've paid a quick visit and thought all the previous comments were pretty valid and hope the original poster is grateful for some valuable points made. |
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|  grogo21 | Feb 2, 10:33pm | Thanks for the comments! I went back and made some changes to the homepage. The purpose of the homepage is to explain what itsCasa is! I found that users are confused about what the site does. Digits and MWebline, you mentioned you were confused when you visited the homepage. I could defiantly see why because you had to hover over square 1 for a result and many users would leave without knowing they had to do so. I made some changes to guide the users along and better explain the site; I hope they are more successful.
- I added an animation to square 1 to guide people to hover over it
- I change the colors of the numbers to guide the user through the 9 squares
- I added one sentence displayed immediately on load to briefly describe the site
- I made the nine squares and the one large graphic next to them clickable
- After the nine steps two links appear. One for a sample homepage and one to create a homepage
Please let me know how you navigate the homepage now and if you find it more insightful. It's important to know that the homepage will be viewed by mostly new users. Users with an account will have their own url itsCasa.com/ Username to go directly to their page so the homepage serves no purpose for them. This is why I don't link back to the homepage on many of my other pages. Also, if a user is already logged in and visits itsCasa.com they will be redirected to their account.
Ben76213
Thanks for the feedback. I have a few responses:
"This is right in Opera.." - True, it's the same concept as the opera feature but how many people use it?
"why share a home page with a web site" - because 9 of your favorite links are one click away. I find it much faster than typing a url or looking through a list of text links in IE and FF. Also, you can access the bookmarks on your browser only on your pc. You can access these bookmarks from any computer online.
"Why do you make commercial for StumbleUpon and Yahoo?" - I don't, those are just sites I placed in that sample users homepage. You would, of course, place whatever sites you wanted in your account. itsCasa.com/ stumbleupon is stumbleupon's homepage. Stumbleupon is a user I created to show you guys what a homepage may look like.
"I think the design of ItsCasa looks great" - Thanks very much. I put a lot of time programming the backend and am happy you like the design too! I will keep working on the front end though!
"But the total function of making a home page in another web site where you might need to log into is not really that nice" - No login is required! If you were to create an account you could visit itsCasa.com/ Ben76213 and your page will appear immediately. You cannot change any settings or add sites without logging in though. If you want to require login to view your homepage there is an optional setting to do so.
I hope I cleared things up a little Ben, let me know if not. Also I don't care which sites you visit. I don't want to monitor that with this site. I was hoping to make a little money to keep the site up by sending searches from the search bar on user's pages.
Also: "No Terms of Service, Privacy Policy, or About Us in the least from the home page." - I'm not sure what I would put in these pages. It's a free service, and I don't collect personal information. Giving an email is optional at signup. What would I put in an about us page?
"SSL for user trust" and SEO - Will do, thanks.
I look forward to your replies! You have all been straight forward and honest so far! Thanks for helping me.
Greg |
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Sponsor | | digits | Feb 3, 2:09am | whew! glad it was received well. ;)
Terms of Service...Letting the users know what is expected if anything. If nothing is expected then leave this alone.
Privacy Policy... If their email is voluntary then maybe here you could assure them that you will not sell or rent their information. Let them know you make use of cookies but that's to enable access to the service and not for advertising purposes. That you may collect aggregate data for purposes of developing your website but nothing personal is ever collected.
About Us... Who the heck are you so new onto the scene? Have you done anything else on the internet that's web2.0ish? Are you a small group of people or one? Are you out of the USA or Belgium? Are you a kid running an experiment for your graduate degree or are you a man who just had this neat idea?
:)
Greg - I'd also remember to keep in mind that the heavy javascript may prohibit function for some users [and perhaps not the users you're targetting, okay, but still...SOME people may not know it's javascripted so with their JS off and visitng the page do not know to give you *trusted* label in which to allow your JS to come through. They would see just a blank page. So either a message or something in the least?]
A better idea I would maintain, however, would be at least a small 50 to 100 word paragraph at the bottom of the squares or above that let people [and robots!] know what the site is about and what is expected for them to continue. Seriously.
I KNOW this can be at lost to ask when you have your design all done [and I DO like it - I really do]...you are reading the queen of graphics heavy who, in 1997, made an entire website comprised of .gifs. ... BUT when I realized Lynx wouldn't pick me up [..and i checked you in Lynx...no. no pick up of course] and nor would the webcrawlers...well...I had to retire that idea. But I didn't retire it without a lot of clawmarks.
...and all I am asking is that you consider a small paragraph and for extra SEO flair, also add some H1 and H2 tags at the top for your Intro Text. Don't ya wanna get picked up by the search engines man? =0 [see image below]
... Thanks for receiving our critiques in the helpful spirit we were intending. I certainly was feeling bad especially when i'd not see hide nor hair of ya. But now I feel better. :)
Love, Digits
"What am I looking at? I would leave." - said by a regular internet user when i sent the site to him and asked him what he thought. He saw the same thing upon arrival as I did and that means that even hovering the buttons did not help. Refer to the image. [The "text" that appears at the bottom is not viewable when one first appears and begins hovering even IF they knew why they were hovering - which he didn't.]
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| | ben76213 | Feb 3, 10:55am | I agree that W3Schools is one of the best sites there are on the internet, but how reliable are this statitics? It doesnīt tell how many who are involved in this measure, or where they taken it from..
They can be talking about how many downloads has been made on each browser, or how many browsers has visited a certain page.. I donīt think this can be used to tell exactly how popular Opera is... Yes, it can give on point on which browser is the most popular,.. The fact is that this can be based on a vote poll on a site where 1000 people voted...
I use Firefox mostly, but I got Internet Explorer, which I use rarely, and Opera.. I use Opera some times but not often.. You got the talk of a site owner,..
So, if I should go through that the statics is really true, does W3Schools got a spyware which monitors what browser people are using? The statics doesnīt tell how many people is taken into this statics,.. It is simply hard to tell how many internet users there are.....
I wouldnīt use this web site, but I am sure some will find use for ItsCasa, I find this site unneccessary and one potentially site for monitor favorite sites, although you claim you are not taking any statics, I take your word for it..
Opera is a very good browser, it is very fast and nice design. I like Firefox better, because there are a lot of things you can add.
Why do you mix spanish and English in ItsCasa? |
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Sponsor | | penman2 | Feb 4, 5:35am | | I agree with digits on the JS issue. My default browsing mode on my Windows machine is to have JS switched off. Occasionally, I come across a site that just presents a blank page (rather than a message telling you have JS switched off and need to enable it to use the site) - I just move on to another site. |
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