Please let me know your thoughts... (My Geek Community)

Hello,
I consider any changes are for good if they were intended to be this way! We'll see...

Pharmamedics.com - Pharmacy Affiliate Program

Hi Van,

I saw this site when the ad first came up and I have to say that I really liked the concept but the implementation could use some work. When I look at this I don't see a community site. It's supposed to be a community, but the central content is news headlines pulled from another site. The animation that's going on there is distracting and preventing me from exploring other parts of the site.

I do see a list of community features down below, but it seems quite distant from the other content featured on the front page. If there are blogs here, then where are they? Some blogs should be highlighted on the front page. The ad here also led me to believe that this was a geek dating site, which is listed quite far down. That does sort of seem like a laundry list of offerings - like you're trying to be all things to all people. Remember that the best businesses are the ones that started out doing one thing really well. Google did search really well, Amazon sold books really well, and Coke sold cola really well. And that was it until they made a significant impact and could expand into other markets.

There are a couple of other things on here that are turn offs to me. First, the Los Angeles weather in the top-right corner. I don't live there, so why do I care? And if I wanted to know what the weather report was there are plenty of other places to go to to find one. I could even get a desktop widget for that if I wanted to. There's also the date up there, which I already know because it's on my windows taskbar and I have two bigger calendars on my desk. The poll is also a turn-off, because it's not specific to the site content at all. It doesn't invite me to engage with the site more and find out what's here. Asking what I think about an important issue, or something about my interests would be better. Finally, at the bottom there is a set of statistics which indicate that nobody is online right now. That's a turn off. No information is better than bad information when it comes to things like this.

I clicked on one of those feed links and found out that they all go to digg. I don't like clicking on a link and being taken to another site unexpectedly. Put up a digg icon there if you're going to use their feeds.

So what's left on the home page that relates to the actual community? A little classifieds block on the left side and the login block. There is very little here that communicates to me what this community is about and why I should join. If I was a regular visitor I would have left long ago. I'm mentally ignoring that flash graphic on the left side because it is so annoying. That might communicate a little more if I could stand to read it.

I'll check out the sign up form - this is another turn off because the text is small and hard to read and there are a bunch of mistakes here. "If you have been sharing any projects of MGC as guest, please use only that mail id." is confusing. MGC is what??? Oh, right, My Geek Community. "Personal" is spelled wrong (Personnel), E-mail is normally just email wrong (then it won't get split over two lines), D.O.B. is unnecessary, just say birth date, "sex" and "gender" are used to refer to the same term. The personal information block asks for a state and a postal code which is bizarre because people in the US have a state and a zip code and in Canada we have a province and a postal code. Maybe this is Australian??? I don't know..

Then the captcha form instructs me to enter the "code" below (it's not code, it's a random string), but the help text below says that it's a word (which it's not).

I clicked on the blogs link to see if I could find any content but it's just a bunch of youtube videos. Great - I could go to youTube to see the same thing (better). THe list in the first post of what this site offers reads like a laundry list of things other sites do better. News feeds? Try netvibes, personalized weather reports? Lots of sites have that. Personal blog space? Blogger, wordpress, lots of others. The next two I'm not sure about but I'm also not sure why I would want to use this site to do it. Geek singles? That sounds interesting but where is it? Free classifieds - Craigslist is better. That doing everyting at once model hasn't worked for anyone that I can think of, except companies like Amazon that have slowly expanded once they already had a strong market share in one niche.

For this site, I think it would be better to create a social network for geeks and then layer in extra functionality later on if the commuinity wants it. Assume that they're going to other sites to get specialty services like newsfeeds and weather.

From the front page I finally found the geeky singles site. This is much better. The design could use some refinement but overall it's communicating pretty well. It is focussed on one thing, it's clear what a person can do here, it's not confusing or distracting, and it does a good job of inviting people to take the next step. I like the graphic in the middle because those people actually look geeky and in love and not too pretty and fake. The SEO is a problem because the title only says "geekysingles.com" and there is very little text for a SE to read.

The design of both pages is okay but could use a lot of refinement. Pay more attention to details like spacing between elements and which colours are chosen. On the geeky singles page the logo looks kind of squished compared to the main community page. The overall colour scheme is good but sometimes odd things show up like the more saturated green on the big singles graphic.

I hope this advice is helpful to you and not too discouraging. The ideas here are good you just need to pay more attention to the details and concentrate on doing one thing really well rather than doing everything.

I liked the logo and colour scheme. That was fine, although the logo could be more geeky and les sexual looking. I thoguht the look and feel was generally good. The brand identity was cohesive enough, but attention to detail was lacking.

About yahoo - they're another example of doing one thing reallyw ell in the beginning and then expanding out. At first they were just a really good directory. The other stuff was added later. That's another example of what I'm talking about when I say do one thing really well at first, then build on it later. Google is doing the same thing. They did search really well and that was it for a long time, then they added email and maps and all kinds of other things.

When i had a glance, i found the site to be pretty good. The logo is worth creative. The title looks apt for SE's to read and accept.

Design wise it looks very nice, neat colors and simple design, also you havent over used flash, but it does seem you have overused javascript. Get some those scripts in external in external pages.

I like the concept also.

Hey Megan,

We really do appreciate your honesty. We have made some changes already to the site. I hope you like progress we are making.

Larry

All I see is a "page cannot displayed" error, the typical Microsoft one.

It must be from your server, as the domain name resolves correctly, and the server is reached. And I don't use Internet Explorer anyway. What's strange is you're running Apache, so it's not likely to be IIS sending that page back.

I had some other people try it too. It seems only clients from .nz get that page. Everyone else (including .au) can load the site. I can load it via a proxy elsewhere.

I doubt it's an ISP, host or other middleman blocking it, since the Apache error page can be loaded fine with a false URL.

Weird. What's going on?

its ok i guess. one thing i hate is not being able to right click, but of course there are ways around it so i dont understand why people bother. just silly.