Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

I came to this site after being a long-time subscriber of the StartupNation podcasts. I heard so many great things about this community in the podcasts, and so finally decided to join.

However, since I`ve joined I have to say I`m not as impressed. The community is probably great no doubt, I haven`t been here long enough to find that out, but my gripes are concerning the site design.

-The site is very bloated, and takes a helluva long time to load on my DSL connection. The main community page is > 50kb.

-The color scheme, layout, menus, backgrounds, etc are not professional at all.

-The site looks and feels like it was done by an over-enthusiastic teenager.

I`m sorry for the bluntness here, but I had to say this because I feel that the site doesn`t live up to Startupnation`s reputation.


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Cardboard is one of the coolest things made from paper
Singapore Web Design + Development | My Geeky Blog
Do Your Part for the Planet | Laptop Skins

Thanks for the honest feedback!!

Anyone else agree? Feel differently?

We want to hear your opinion. Let us have it!!

Thanks for posting. I am sure others will comment and the top brass will read it. I think you have some valid points. Nevertheless, I am happy to see you here.

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Vincent Wilcox (a.k.a. KRAKR)
Drummer
My band: Letters Make Words

I think it`s easy to guess that I don`t agree with all your comments, although I do respect your opinon and admit that we can`t please everyone, 100%of the time.  I`ve address your comments briefly below...

-  We try to keep the size of our pages at an optimal size for the majority of our site visitors.  Our community landing page is currently 31.73 KB, which we don`t believe is an overly large file-size page for the typical 2007 internet user. 

-  The majority of the feedback that we`ve received on the branding, layout, and overall user experience of StartupNation.com has been extremely positive.  This isn`t soley based on antedotal comments, but on user-testing where we asked a random sample of our target audience to describe their impression of our website and brand.  (yes..my mom loves the site too!)  We`ve also received similar results from third-party companies and sponsors who`ve included us in their branding surveys.

-  I will personally accept the "teenager" compliment and I am 100% guily of being overly-enthusiastic about StartupNation. 

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Brian Cleveland,
Web Producer,
StartupNation

Thanks for the fast responses. I hope I wasn`t misunderstood. I love this site, and have used it many times (the 10 steps to open for business page) as an example to others. My comments were mainly about the forums.

I wasn`t trying to bash you either Brian. I`m a web developer myself and I get my share of criticisms as well.

The community landing page right now is about 37KB  for the HTML and 250KB in all. The forums homepage is a whopping 50 KB for HTML, and 300 KB for everything. This is definitely too big even in 2007.

http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/?url=http://www.startupnation.c om/pages/community/forums.asp&treeview=0&column=obje ctID&order=1&type=0

Design is always subjective, and I`m (a tech-savvy firefox user) probably not your major target user profile. But hope my comments will help in some way.

On a different note, how can I get the link in the sig to actually become a link?



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Cardboard is one of the coolest things made from paper
Singapore Web Design + Development | My Geeky Blog
Do Your Part for the Planet | Laptop Skins

Try this jimbodk :

http://www.startupnation.com/pages/community/forum_codes.asp

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Oleg Issers | StartupNation.com Web Team

50% of computer programming is trial and error. The other 50% is copy and paste.

Thanks Oleg. Cool stuff. It`s working now.

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Cardboard is one of the coolest things made from paper
Singapore Web Design + Development | My Geeky Blog
Do Your Part for the Planet | Laptop Skins

jimbodk... since your a programmer you probably only need this page. But I did a quick forum search using "signature" as my search term. I found these resources and conversations about the subject.

Why is my signature url not a "link"?
clickable links in sinature line

Have a great day!


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Vincent Wilcox (a.k.a. KRAKR)
Drummer
My band: Letters Make Words

The first thing that struck me as I went to this page was the use of the Sims video game as the backdrop of your homepage banner.  This seems highly unprofessional to me... not to mention no credit was given to the game for supplying the graphic.

I have aborted my provisional patent entry because none of this information is being protected with HTTPS.   Why isn`t this confidential information protected via secure http versus in "the clear"?