The Business of Software

This board is quickly loosing any value for me. This used to be about how to make great software and running your software business. Those are interesting topics. A thousand posts with links to half built websites *is not interesting*.

What if we ask Joel to create a new board for website reviews so that they can be in their own area and not detract from the discussion here.

Better yet, why not just post your links to http://joel.reddit.com/ and people can comment there if all you want is someone to look at your website.

Ian, your post is an ideal target for deletion by the moderators.  We don't talk about the forum on the forum.  It's boring.

I'm one of the people who is supposed to be deleting your post.  I want to do it, because that's what I'm supposed to do.

Unfortunately, I can't bring myself to do it.  I agree with your post.  This is The Business of Software, not The Practice of Web Design.

So in an act of civil disobedience, I'm going to respond to this post.  I'll let Bob or Michael or Joel delete it.

:-)

Nice site, Ian.

I like the stylish gray background combined with a lush white column for your site's content. The classical use of black text meets expectations.

However, your website is greatly lacking in the Web 2.0 appartment: no AJAX, no tags, and you don't have one of those nifty 'Digg this!' buttons.

Still, a nice site. Congratulations!

Thanks Eric (I think)!

I'm not trying to be rude. I've been on this forum for 2 years. It's just that it's the "business of software" forum. I think these guys should have a place to post their links, just not here.

Yeah... I'm in agreement with Ian.  The constant stream of site-review spamming has gotten annoying to the point where I don't visit as often.

Ian, are you against all review requests (including product, business, pricing, etc. reviews) or only site design reviews?

Btw, this should be the place for site design reviews:

http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=12

Not at all. Pricing questions are totally appropriate. I'm mostly not digging the website design questions. I mean just look back at the topics before this one. There's dozens of "hey you have some time to do a site review" posts. Now go back 6 months. You pretty much won't see any.

The website is a critical part of most of our software businesses, so I believe it is relevant - especially if it is a review in terms of business value rather than pure aesthetics. Also it is possible to ignore these posts as long as they have appropriate an appropriate subject.

But they are getting rather frequent. Perhaps a new forum would be appropriate?

Sure it's relevant but these posts tend to not "feel" right. Go back and read some. Most of the sites have had little thought put into them. Most of the posts are by people you've never seen here before. To me that makes these much different than a post by a long time poster and/or a site that has had some thought put into it but needs "tweaking" and the owner is simply asking for help with those final tweaks.

It could be I'm way off base. If everyone else likes these then stick with them. Perhaps it's time for a change of scenery anyway.

While I agree with Ian that the frequency and relative quality of the site reviews has been getting annoying, I wouldn't want them to go any other place.  That's one of the things this specific forum is great for is announcing your new product idea and getting feedback from the community.

However, I think there are a few ways we can improve the process. 

1) People should be showing us their new IDEA or PRODUCT, not their website.  And the responders should critique the IDEA, the EXECUTION, pricing etc..  The website can be critiqued but lets not make that the primary focus.  There are better forums for getting design advice.  It's annoying when someone comes out with "Tea Cup Designer 1.0" and all anyone talks about is the color on the first H1 tag should be a little more bold.  I think it's fair to say "no one will buy your product because your website is terrible", but at least include some praise or critism of the product itself in that process ("your product is awesome, and i'd buy 50, but not from that shoddy website").

2) Don't bother posting something until it's "customer ready".  A lot of the sites and products here lately look thrown together.  Our feedback isn't useful if you plan on "getting around" to making it better later.  As it says in the side bar, participate a little so we know who you are first.  I'm much more willing to even read the thread of someone I "recognize" here then some person i've never heard of. 

3) Follow up!  The saddest thing to me is how 100 new products and sites are shown on here a week, but we really never hear about them again.  This kind of goes hand-in-hand with number 2 where a lot of the submitters are not really "members" of the community.

"Most of the sites have had little thought put into them. Most of the posts are by people you've never seen here before."

I think you've hit it on the head.  Quite a few of them (most?) seem to be from one-post wonders who show up, drop a link and move along.  In many scenarios, this would be considered spam...


I did like Eric's comment:  "the first rule of BoS:  You don't talk about BoS."

I totally agree with Ian.

The site reviews severly decrease the signal-to-noise ratio. They really belong on a different forum somewhere. (Umair's recommendation to use the sitepoint.com forums for this purpose is right on the money, btw.)

I stopped paying attention to the site review posts months ago. To me, they're just attempts to get visitors from a target audience.

I vote to get rid of 'em.

-David

I agree with Ian, and I also agree that most of these are spam. The person has no interest in feedback, they are interested in drawing traffic to their site, which often sells tools for developers, so they are posting to a targetted audience.

Btw, if you choose words for the title carefully, you can get your topic listed on the first page of google search results for certain keywords. This can be a good way to cash the popularity of this forum. Sort of free-riding. :)

Well, i guess though it is totally relevant to business but it is against the spirit of *Business of Software*. To me, talking about business of software should include Strategy, Marketing, Sales, PR , Pricing and etc but NOT *hey, do you have a minute. I couldn't hire a pro, so can you give me a feedback on my design. Wow, i just learned that in two hours. Who says its NOT easy*

I don't understand two things.First, people don't spend time on their ideas and website designs in first place so why the hell on earth they think others will spend some time on their websites and ideas and give them a good feedback. Honestly, knowledgeable and people who are best at answering your, such a ,question will just ignore your question.Secondly, JOEL is  still quite about it, but why? I know one thing for sure, if he says its OK to post request for website design comments then we will be soon discovering ourselves adopting to that climate :)

More importantly, i even doubt people re-read their posts and subjectlines before posting their questions on this forum. Well, if you are looking for a serious advice then you should take it seriously yourself first.I guess headlines/subjectlines have been deceiving us all and its really time to take a look at a gem that addresses this issue

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/980906.html

As someone who posted for a site review just several months ago, this is going to come off as totally hypocritical. That said, I completely agree with Ian. Since then, the forum has become overrun with them.

And while I don't believe that BoS should be a gated community, it does seem disingenuous when people bungee in just for a site review.

Maybe Bob can put a link for SitePoint in the sidebar.

I agree.  To me, it falls under the general category of "if you have to ask, well, then your site probably needs some work."  If you are thinking about posting a site here (on "Business" of software) you should already be past the "how do I make my site suck less" phase and well into the "how can I leverage my site more effectively to make my business successful" phase. 

If your site sucks, it's OK to ask for help, but there's more than enough of that going around to merit a separate forum.

I've been following every site review closely as I will be getting to that stage myself soon and I don't want to make the same mistakes. The tips are usually the same:

1) What is it you are selling? It is not obvious
2) Too many words
3) Horrid colors
4) Do you have a flash demo
5) Spelling
6) Get a designer
etc..

Why not put this into the BoS wiki which someone suggested earlier? Oh, and what happened with that project anyway?

Is there a FAQ? Reachable from here?

As outback says, there's a lot of common questions that get asked - and I think we as a group can simply point people to the FAQ. Once they've demonstrated that they've done the basics, then we can discuss their web site in more detail.

> This board is quickly loosing any value for me.

Uh, don't read the review topics? They are one line in a list of topics. It shouldn't be that hard to avert your eyes.

And nothing is more boring the meta discussions of a board on a board.

Er: how about a new forum dedicated to reviews and critiques?

I skip 'em myself, but the appetite and need is definitely there. Force anyone who wants this service to post to that forum and reserve this forum for everything-but.

Review requests could be for:

Products
Web sites
Ad copy
Business plans
Hiring plans
Outsourcing plans

IE, any proposed tactic related to the business of software could be grist for such a section.

Thanks Ian for saying what I was thinking but couldn't say (since I asked for a review a month or two back).  One review per week wasn't bad, but it does seem to have gotten out of hand.