27 replies to this topic

[phatuis]

legend112, on Nov 17 2009, 11:55 PM, said:

i beg to differ, for a real newbie..it is a necessity

you can skip it but you'll be running the risk of wasting time on something that somebody would have told you to change long back. reviews do save time man. After creating a site, if not reviewed by lots of people who you wish to target, you might get lots of traffic but no returns...so reviews will put you in a safe bracket early on and thus, are a way for one to improve their site

I beg to differ, for a newbie, they could just ask there friend. With all the trends and stuff changing all the time, the easiest way to get a review is to ask a friend, thus not making it a necessity.

[legend112]

phatuis, on Nov 18 2009, 01:32 PM, said:

I beg to differ, for a newbie, they could just ask there friend. With all the trends and stuff changing all the time, the easiest way to get a review is to ask a friend, thus not making it a necessity.

i think i was misunderstood here.

asking a friend for a review is still getting a review If you think its advisable for someone to create a site and not ask around to see if the target is pleased, then you haven't run communities. its all about improvement and moving with the times, what better way to do that than ask the experts for a detailed review?

I am sure one can manage without ever getting someone to say put this in that space and do this not that, but they would have to be well experienced to know so much.

I have run sites and saw the benefits of reviews, the activity increased like hell and i got frequent posters on the forums, reviews are important gents but there is so much that makes a good site so if other things are on point, one can still succeed.

[phatuis]

It is not a necessity, there is nothing saying you must please customers, it is just common sense. I am an expert when it comes to such a topic. Like I say, I review forums on a fairly large Promotion Forum, the largest out there, so I think I know what I am doing.

[Strikee]

I dont think there are specific rules on how to create a website in order to get more and more visitors. Basically you need continuous SEO to bring the visitors for the first time , and second you need good and large content in order to make users STAY ONLINE and even COME BACK. It's not an easy job but thanks to all the tutorials out there , anyone who can read , can do it!.

A few simple rules about a good website would be to keep it simple , especially if it's a niche oriented! , When people enter this kind of site they want to get exactly what they were looking for so a niche website should never be too complicated.
Giving out too much informations and from diferent areas then the orietend ones will not make anyone to keep surfing your site.

It's a risky choice ,having a niche website , usually means limited potential , becase of limited numbers of people searching for what you're offering! as opposed to a General Website or even a forum which can have content from all internet's domain and can be changed as times go by.

I myself rather use blogs and forums then complicated html manual made websites , they are alot easier to manage , easier to get visitors , and of course alot easier to set up at start.

Best and Easiest way to make a quick website THAT HAS TRAFFIC is in my opinion through BLOGSPOT , these blogs get almost isntant indexing and lots of traffic with so little SEO , but the sad thing about them is as i said before , they will never have the potential of a large general website! , blogs are limited no matther how well known are they , around the internet.

There are bloggers out there with huge traffic , and as we all know visitors to blogs come mainly from feeds, google and.. well.. the fact that you want to come back on a certain blog because you like how he writes. Anyway.. the point is even this well known bloggers don't ever get as many impressions as a an Online Community.
A Blog could have twice , thrice the unique visitors of a forum for example , but the second one will get maybe even 5-10 times more impressions.

Good luck with your websites.

Edited by Strikee, 25 December 2009 - 12:18 PM.

[Xalor]

Quote

5) Fonts: Remember if you stray from using the standard fonts that everyone has installed on their computers (such as Arial, Verdana, Times New Roman) the viewer won't see your fonts as intended. Your users' computers will display your site in their default fonts. Stick to standards. If you must have a certain font used you'll have to turn it into a graphic to maintain its look.

Actually this shouldn't hold you back since you can use the now-implemented utility in CSS. Its called @fontface, and its probably the best design tool you can use. Even IE can work here, and basically every browser can work with either EOFF or opentypefonts except IE which only works on EOFF but fontsquirrel can also help you there. Font Squirrel also provides free fonts that have commercial licenses so you can just mass convert them using their tool. Its at fontsquirrel.com, its a really usefull site, just like dafont.com but it has only ones that you can use everywhere without linking back.
Most of your tips are usefull but I wouldn't always foster a community like you said in:

Quote

6) Make It Sticky: Include interactive features if possible, such as live news feeds. Check out http://www.moreover.com for tons of news feed topics you can paste into your site for free. Use chat rooms, discussion boards, etc. You want to create a sense of community where people will want to return.

7) Newsletter: If you're going to have a website you need to offer a newsletter, even if it's strictly going to be about sale items, specials or site updates. You need to start collecting a list of your visitors' email addresses so you can keep in touch with them. Ezines help to keep your site fresh in the client's mind and helps to establish trust and credibility. For more on how to start your own ezine see http://www.ezineuniversity.com

Instead I would work on providing content before community. By relying on community you lose the chance to become your own person and your site looks like another forum or facebook or a myspace. You need to provide the content not the users, in order to make it obvious that you are looking to improve the world with your site, not just gain some quick bucks of google adwords or adsense, whatever its called these days.

Notice from rvalkass:

Quote tags are required around all content you copy from other sources.

[Terko]

Really good tips for newbies...I think people will be greatful to you for inlighting their brains)) LOL))))

[Rael IAK]

My biggest concern with sans-serif fonts on a computer monitor is that, while they are "easier on the eyes", they leave certain characters in a rather ambiguous state. Uppercase "I"s and lowercase "L"s are impossible to tell apart. I figure I can guess what is supposed to be what about 95% of the time. The problem I have is with things like URLs, e-mail addresses, passwords and such. As these are strings of characters that are seldom English (or any other language, for that matter), context won't help you much. I suppose that you could put most of your next in sans-serif and then use a serif font in these particular cases but I'm not sure .....

What do other people think about this?

[T X]

I never use flash for anything since it's overrated and not that great. However I usually do use a Java applet simply because it's simple and pretty much everyone has the plugin in their browser and if they don't it's their loss.