On a lot of bulletin boards, blogs and mailing lists you see business people and designers posting about their new websites in the hope of getting a review.
Unfortunately in many cases they really don’t want a review and get quite offended when people point out the shortcomings of their website design and / or content
Ross Cooney, on the other hand, is much more gracious and it’s something you have to respect.
Earlier today he posted to the open list about his new business venture
It was ripped to shreds by the contributors, but Ross took the time to reply to each and every comment and closed with :
Once again the OPEN list has out-done itself. I have quite a bit of work to do….thank you for your comments.
He’s just had his “baby” ripped to pieces in public and yet he has the good sense and grace to take it all on board and thank his peers for their input.
I remember the first time I posted a website to the OPEN list for review. I wanted to cry! They were cruel, so terribly cruel, but looking back it was probably one of the best things that could have happened to me.
Asking your peers to review your site before unveiling it to the public can be an unpleasant experience, yet it can also be highly rewarding.
If you want your business to grow you need to listen to what the “outsiders” think and what they perceive
You may not always like what you hear, but it’s still a worthwhile exercise…
I just finished reading yet another guerilla marketing book, so I guess I’m a bit susceptible to this line of thought 🙂
Guerilla Marketing On-line Attack: 100 Low Cost, High Impact Strategies for Creating Profits on the Internet
I love reading the n00b “check out my new site” threads on Boards, they’re a hoot. Someone should run a book on whether each new OP will crawl into a corner never to reappear, or flame out in a blaze of idiocy.
ROFL
So true 🙂
If only there was a way of tracking them
Since we’re ripping on people’s websites… 😉
two issues:
1. When on the homepage of your blog, because the posts are only excerpts it’s stripped out the a hrefs, so it’s confusing, especially on short posts where you say ‘check this out.’ … yet there’s no link. If possible I’d look into taking out the code that strips out the links.
2. In the comments, the ‘get Your own gravatar’ text for each comment is coming out of it’s own little box and making it difficult to read any of the comments – firefox 1.5.
Cheers.
ah ok, problem 2 occurs only when the images from gravatar.com don’t load.
Danger – I’m probably getting the blog redesigned at some stage in the next few weeks. Rather than hacking about I’m going to be getting a professional to do it for me, as I’m really sick of ALL the templates 🙂