folksin the village got a website

Hi Roy,

Sorry it took me so long to get to reviewing your site!

This looks pretty good overall. The design is quite pleasing generally. I am having a bit of a problem figuring out waht this is. A little intro statement on the front page might help explain that to users. You explained it here in your message but not on the site.

I think the logo could use a little bit of work. I like the symbol you have in the favourites icon but it doesn't appear anywhere on the page. Try putting that next to the logo. Also make the tagline smaller and closer to the logo text. I think the font for the logo is okay but could be a tad bit more unique.

Navigating around, one thing I really don't like is the dark blue lines between columns. Something more subtle would be better there - possibly a light background colour or a paler grey line isntead of the harsher blue.

The page layouts and navigation throughout is a little confusing. More space between menu items would make them easier to read. THe main menu keeps changing as I navigate around - that's making things more confusing. I tried to find a village by selecting the county of Wiltshire (where my boyfriend lives!). The next page is a jumbled list of villages - these should be displayed as a list or at least as a full block of left-aligned text rather than centering. I noticed this on the front page too - centering text just makes things look jumbled and messy and hard to read.

So I found a village to click on and the next page is again a bit of a jumbled mess. The news section seems to be general to the entire site ( so why is it on this village page?). The navigation again is difficult to read because it's so jammed together. There's also some confusing thigns listed there (what is skype doing there???). I clicked on "village members" there and got an error message saying that I don't have permission to access this page. If I was a regular visitor, I'd be leaving by now.

The chat is an interesting idea but it's sort of being lost by the other stuff on the page. I think for a village site you might want to add in some different features. Really, in a small village people can chat with each other in real life anytime they want, so why would they want to do it online? Creating websites like this could be a good idea you just have to think about what people would really want. Make it clear up front what the site has to offer, and make it easy to use. This is pretty well set up for a start, it just needs some refinement to really take off.

i like the site the only bit i dont like is that my village isnt on it and im really disappointed

I thin it's a great idea. Nice to see my home town is on there although i think it's going to take a while until every town/ villiage / city in the UK have a member posting on there.
I think that you could possibly describe your site on the main page, viewers will know exactly what your intentions are for this Site.

Sorry I have been so long coming back to review your site - I got myself set up and found my village very easily. That is where the problems started there - google maps is fascinating - why dont I remember to use it

Nice and easy to navigate round and I found myself skipping round all the villages in our area and having a ball.

Great concept - I love it but do agree that the title needs a bit of 'oomph'

Firstly you havent got Kent on there
I love the idea its original and I think if you advertised more it would become very successful.
The only thing I would change is on the homepage the dates for the topics is a very similar colour to the background so they are quite hard to see.
Other than that great site and keep up the great work.

Tez

Thanks for looking folks, a common observation seems to be that the site doesn’t explain it’s self on the main page very well, I will try to address that one.
Rlineker
I thought I had every village what is your village called and in which county is it in please? And I’ll check
Tezza
I have got Kent on there all 613 villages

The news and the Chat on most of the 18,000 pages/sites is the same because folks are not chatting or posting news yet. It’s the default news and chat. It all looks very similar and boring atm.

The concept though…what do you think to the concept?

I have 73,892 individual google adsense adverts on folksin.com
Each one driven by the content on the page. Currently they’re picking up voip telecoms because that’s the default news, they also pick up county level ads such as “hotels in Kent” “singles in Cumbria” etc.
when the news changes the ads will change so if 5 people advertise their cars for sale then the google ads change to car related.

But I have 18,473 chat rooms on folksin.com all communicating a few bytes with the server and that can burn bandwidth.

The basic concept is
You know where your friends live so you should be able to contact them on the internet.
It’s an outlet for very small businesses window cleaners, local shops, child minders etc. for £2 (3.69 USD) they can advertise on the web where it matters in their village.

I’ve still got a lot of work to do, some villages have 1 house and others say York has 185,000 villagers.

It doesn’t take a mathematician to work out the revenue if 1 person per village pays £2 to post a news article or click on an advert.

This is my scariest site, I have nightmares about folksin.
the googlebot lives on there I think it's trying to have sex with my site

Thanks tezza Kent it’s easily missed in the mass.

I’m going to promote my village Snaith in E-Riding-of-Yorkshire just using the tools on the website and monitor it.

I wrote a bit of code that takes the village name and makes postcards and an A4 poster for folk to print out.

I’ll put a postcard in the newsagents window and one in the chip shop and I’ll put a poster in the village hall. We have a population of almost 2,000 it should give me some figures to work on.