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By LuisCypher on
This is my first site. I registered a domain name on 7th of January
Before starting the site I didn't know any CSS or PHP and I had never even heard about SEO.
It started as a personal experiment. My goal was/is to build a successful and useful site without having any previous experience.
I originally started it with !Joomla, but ran into problems, the site was becomming too large for one guy to maintain. This was partly due to inexperience and poor planning.
I restarted with Drupal in order to implement some automation, and ease the maintenance of some site wide content.
I have had a few setbacks -mostly inexperience and a poor choice of host - but I think the site is at the point where I am happy with the general layout and function.
If you are interested please take a look. I think some of you will find it useful.
There are some reviews and articles found on the front page but the sites primary focus is to list user submitted issues and problems with products.
The product listings are NOT reviews, the site isn't trying to push an agenda. I had the idea after I made a poor purchase and after reading about the scandal involving Belkin's reviews. I just wanted a place where I could find out about a products problems, issues and anoyances before I made a purchase. No agenda, no opinion, no hype and no marketing.
I decided to make my own.
Here are some useful links from the site :
- The front page
- Companies - you can find company support pages here, as well as their forums. There are also links to news articles listed on each company page (look up Nvidia and Sony)
- Submissions - add products, reviews or add an issue to a product listing.
- Product listings by type
I also made a Firefox Plugin found at the Firefox addons home page. Over the last 2 days it has had 224 downloads, I am just starting to see users coming through from this now.
So far I have managed to add:
- Geo-targeting , (I have placed adds to finance a move to a better host )
- A points system so that users can make poor products or companies more visible to others
- Customized a fuzzy search component for my requirements in drupal 6.12
- Created various forms for submissions and reviews
If you are interested in the sites developement over time you can read about it here I kept a log of development so that people like me with no prior experience could learn from my mistakes. In combination with the FAQ it is also a way for me to make the sites functions more transparent to users. I want the site to be trusted.
I still have some quirks to fix that are caused by caching ( the vote system, java scripts are buggy in IE) but the site is pretty stable, other than the host :(
I appreciate all input , suggestions and advice. If you think the site is useful go grab the search plugin, add us to your stumbleupon , tweet, submit a product issue, vote, what ever ...the site is at the point now where it needs some community feedback and support.
Ok if you have read this whole post thankyou for taking the time.
LC
Comments
Nice service for users so i
Nice service for users so i think it's need some design improvements
Thanks for looking
What design improvements would you suggest.
I want to keep it simple - I am the only one running the site and it is pretty large.
I wanted to implement a facet search as a kind if drill down menu but the host I am on at the moment is too under powered for that.
For example
You can use Views module (i don't know if you already use it)
Views module is really great and powerful module with simple theming operations. With this module and some theming, you can generate some lists like most issued products, todays issues,... So if you already using views on your project, you must theme this views outputs. It's require some basic php and CSS knowledge.
Also you can use some jQuery or Mootools library to generate Carousels, Slideshows and banners for sitewide interactivity. I've wrote an article about this (Drupal modules in projects). But it's turkish : ) Here's an URL. May be you can translate it with some online service like Google or Babylon. Anyway, this techniques will improve your sites search engine rankings and user activity.
Thanks again
Yep I use views , I have "the most voted on items" at the top of the page and the frontpage articles/reviews are dynamically ordered with views. I have lists of the most popular and highest rated, all attached to menu items. The only CSS I have realy changed at the moment is within the theme.
I have been focussing more on implementing automation and reducing management with PHP scripts as the site is getting quite large and I am the only maintainer. I think there are over 900 pages already. I had some trouble earlier this week with a persistant spammer and I need to get some things more under control. If things get out of hand 900 pages are a lot o check.
Your site looks interesting, I will check it out further tomorrow ( 2:30 am here now), see if I can translate enough to make sense.
Thankyou for the feedback, I may attempt some further theming later once I have fixed my security problems.
The Logo is too small and hidden
I skimmed your site developement write up nice. I like the site the colors and lay out are professional looking and easy to look at.
The one thing I would change is the header, Your logo is to small and not very noticeable so it leaves nothing for a viewer to remember (just another site with stuff)
I would move the most recent list out of the header area and put your logo in there so people will know where they are.
Thanks for taking the time to look and go through the blog too
Thankyou for the encouraging comments , and you are probably right about the logo. It is something I had been thinking about myself, debating the merits of changing the logo now or later. Also whether to create a real logo (not just text)
I have been unsure if I should change it yet because at the moment users generally come to the site by either the Firefox plugin I made or via google, they land on the product listing pages read the problems and issues then go on their way.
This is how the site is meant to be used but it leaves much of the site undiscovered by users.
The "recent activity block" has a tendency to get people to explore more of the site and maybe comment/vote/interact a bit more. Most of the visitors that explore deeper into the site start with those links.
I do intend to enhance the logo and graphics once I have slightly more traffic. With regular users I might not need to rely so heavily on my search plugins etc. At the moment the site is 9 weeks old under Drupal and I am getting only about 100 visitors a day.
I am also pretty bad at photoshop :(
"100 unique visitors" is not
"100 unique visitors" is not a bad value, at this moment may be you should use some newsletter techniques to call your visitors back to your site after a days.
very use site to have. how
very use site to have. how did you make your site a firefox addon? i have never thought of that.
Firefox plugin and Open search
The FireFox plugin is just an extension of opensearch, the main difference is that if I change what the site uses to search with (at the moment a modified fuzzy search) then I can update the plugin. All the users that have it installed will receive the update through Mozilla.
If you don't know what opensearch, or auto-discovery is then head over to my site, I just put up a blog post on how you can set this all up for your own site.
I have shown 3 ways that you can deliver your site search to users.
A link
Auto descovery
Mozilla add-ons
Test them out to see the difference - (I might have broken them this afternoon by messing around so you might not be able to lol )
The open search part should only take you about 5 minutes, hope you or someone else finds it useful.
quite useful
thank you very much for answering so completely and good luck with your site!
Any help would be great.
Could any community members who are from the UK, a European country or Canada please take a look and see if the site loads on their first visit.
Also if the three buttons at the bottom of each "issue list" appears to direct you to an expected destination. You don't need to click the links just hover over them and it should show something like "Check out the features using X from the EU or UK" European and UK visitors should also see links to play.com - Do they appear?
Since my last post I have cleaned up some scripts re-arranged menues and features.
I will probably edit my original post in this thread soon to clean it up too and add images explaining the workflow of the site as a fair amount of it is automated/scripted now.
Any help or feedback is appreciated, I have had difficulty testing and fixing geo targeted links.