Review: the10thatmatter.com

[ghippleh]

I just finished and launched a site. It has about 150 pages. As of yet the only thing I haven't got completely done is the navigation panel on the right side. It works but I'm hoping for now most users will use the search tool which does work. I tried making the site as simple as possible... i.e. no images except for 1 ad on each page. My site ranks top 10 lists which I hope isn't a problem for google since most of the content is not in sentences and only listed in tables. Please tell me what you guys think... especially about its viability with search engines (google, yahoo, msn)

My sites url is http://www.the10thatmatter.com

Thank you for your input... I really need it!

[JDM71488]

I like the design/layout. Why are you not doing a dynamic Web site? No back-end scripting capabilities?

You don't really have a lot of information on the about or contact pages so you could get rid of the menu and have all of the information on the home page.

The home page would also list like the lastest list or whatever.

I'm not big on a lot of fluid designs (just my opinion) if they do not have a lot of design or content like yours. I think you could get away with making a smaller but similar layout in a fixed width.

There is a lot of white space (1280x1024) so you might want to add some soft blues or grays in your layout?

[ghippleh]

Thanks for the tips.. I went ahead and implemented some of them. I especially liked the 'newest list'. I also Updated my navigation panel so my site is now fully functional. Although I still plan to keep the site very very simple I am still in the process of adding some graphics and perhaps some of those white space fillers you were talking about. Thanks for the advice!

[benifactor]

how do you get the content from the lists? user supplied? you add them? get content from a search engine?

[ghippleh]

I add them. Its a real pain in the butt.

[JDM71488]

You should set up a form that the user fills out with the list name and list items that is submitted to a database. You could then log in and approve/publish, edit/publish, or deny/delete... I think you should also make your Web site dynamic... It will save you from having to do a ton of work later on if you do a little bit of work now.

My .02

[benifactor]

i agree... dynamic now saves 1000's of hours :)

[ghippleh]

I like that idea about approve/publishing user lists. The reason I didn't add user lists before was because I didn't trust users from putting up completely bogus stats but adding that feature you suggested would nullify my concerns. As for making a dynamic site: I would if I knew how. I do however use library items in dreamweaver which makes updating the side panel and title bar very easy. Is this what having a dynamic would do? What are all the benefits of having a dynamic site in my case? Thanks again for the input.

[benifactor]

not in the sense that allowing users to add list that you approve before they go public. not that a user adds a list and it goes public automatically. being dynamic means that you need not edit 100 pages of html, rather you change something or aqdd something once and it goes live.

[JDM71488]

Mainly because if you ever decide to move to a dynamic Web site in the future you will have a ton more content that you have to move over if you didn't decide to do it now.

You could have a template page that is database driven and would use the functionality of query strings: (Example: domain.com/list.php?id=1234)

[ghippleh]

is this via javascript or perl or something like that?

[benifactor]

I use php. but you could use perl, asp etc.