Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

I have the privilege of starting up a sporting website with a few friends of mine.  The idea is simple.  We would like to create a wiki-type environment where users can post and read all sorts of articles related to sports, for free.  I am interested in receiving any feedback regarding improving our website.  The URL is www.sportinghelp.com.  Thanks for your help.

Regards,




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Daniel Kim SportingHelp.com

Hi Daniel,

Wow, this is one strange site.

1. Sort out your grouping. It`s really confusing when some are grouped because they are similar (baseball and softball) while other just have the first letter in common (sailing and soccer). Also think about what you`ll do as the list of sports grows.
2. In your group headings you`re using onclick to handle links. This is a really bad idea. It won`t work for people without Javascript enabled (they still exist), it`s not accessible and doesn`t allow the browser to give a visual clue that this is actually a link.
   
3. The text below the headings is hard to read and almost redundant (they all have the same message worded differently)
4. The layout is slightly broken in Firefox (1 in 5 people don`t use IE)
5. Don`t use tables to layout the page. CSS is a much better solution.
   

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Blog - http://www.buggy.id.au/

Hmmm. The thing that struck me as strange is on the first few levels of navigation your body copy is the link, rather that the header... then it switches and the header is a link, not the body copy. Personally, I wanted to click on the headers, and found it strange (I rarely see this) to see a whole chunk of copy as a link.

Otherwise, interesting concept. I can see this generating at least some revenue for you... I wonder how well it`s going to get indexed by search engines though, since the content is dynamically generated. Too bad it`s not in PHP, you could have done a mod_rewrite and made those pages appear static to search engines. (anyone know if there`s a way to do that with IIS?). With all of that content it would be a shame if it didn`t show up in google searches, especially since your revenue is coming from adsense and affilliate programs. I did a quick check, and it looks like Google has only indexed the main page... and has not crawled any deeper. You should consult with a SEO pro to see what you can do.

The design isn`t bad. Certainly you have the potential to reach a very large potential audience. Keep us posted about how things progress with this!


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-Zepp

Creative solutions for digital communication; providing web site design and marketing for small businesses.

RichardBuggy,

Thanks for your inputs.  I would agree with you regarding the main category layout.  We`ll look into that and try to do some re-organizing.  I`m not sure about your comment regarding Firefox, as I use Firefox as well and have not encountered this problem.  Could you provide some details?  What exact webpage was it?

Regards,

Daniel


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Daniel Kim SportingHelp.com

Zepp,

Thanks for your inputs and support.  We definitely like your idea about using an SEO and will look into that possibility.

Regards,

Daniel




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Daniel Kim SportingHelp.com