Ask HN: Pre-launch feedback on my site
Prompted in part by HN, I am in what I hope to be the final stages of launching v1 of a new site. Five sentences of background:
I am a blogger/freelance copywriter/marcom guy who is always monitoring the latest and greatest in tech. I have an immense interest in web services and a great admiration for the people/teams behind them, simply put, because they make my life easier. I do not however, have an appropriate outlet through which I can share the various services I come across and thank the teams behind them by giving them exposure. Most services I find do not fit well with the content I cover at the main blog I write for, so I needed another way. As such, I did my best to create one...
Services like Stumble Upon, Digg, etc are fantastic for people who have plenty of expendable time to devote. Even with the big-name blogs covering web apps and services, it can be hard for the average office worker to keep up with the waterfall. I wanted to try hitting the problem from a different angle - using the Woot.com principle as a basic model.
My site, worthyy, presents users with one new site to explore each day. The presentation is unique in that users experience each day's site without any outside influence from me or anyone else (beyond visible ratings). I want the developer's work to do the talking, so the homepage of worthyy is dynamic. It consists of two frames: The main frame being the actual site of the day and a secondary frame in front of it near the bottom of the screen (the 'worthyy bar'). Users can browse and experience the site of the day as if they had hit it directly. If they so desire, they can also use the worthyy bar to rate the site, bookmark the site or click through to interact with others and discuss the site on worthyy's supporting pages (wordpress).
http://worthyy.com
Thanks in advance for any feedback you guys might have. We do have a few issues left to be resolved - and when I say we I mean the developers I outsourced the project to. I know, I know - but without any coding experience or time to learn, I had no choice. For this reason of course, your feedback is invaluable. Barring catastrophe the site should be ready to launch next week. Thanks also to the few HN members who have been involved with preliminary testing and for their feedback. I already have some great additions lined up for v2 should I be lucky enough to get that far with the project.
First of all - I like the concept - if it develops enough community weight behind it, it could be quite an influential tool.
What's not clear to me is what that community is exactly - are you targeting a particular segment?
I like the look and feel generally. Although - I find the actual site being reviewed today a bit bland, so that might give a poorer first impression.
I personally think the bottom worthyy bar is a bit too big vertically, especially given it's only giving a few discrete bits of information and some links - I work on a laptop a lot though, so I'm a bit precious about screen realestate.
If you are going to take up that realestate - then I'd put some more information there. For example a "worm" graph of what people thing - or have a sort-of twitter feed of top comments... Hmmm... On the other hand, that might be just annoying.
It also doesn't seem to play nice with resizing - (Firefox3 on Mac).
Fails the critical "I visit the site and know what it does without prior explanation" test. Add a subtitle that explains what the site does: "A new site each day" or something.
Nice idea. Small bug with Safari, when I scroll, the worthyy banner scrolls up the page and I'm unable to click any of the links. I'm using Safari v3.1.2 on Leopard 10.5.5.
I really like this. It's simple and fun. I agree that the front page setup needs a little tweaking. I'd actually put the bottom bar up at the top with a little explanation blurb by the logo, as if you're introducing the site, which is essentially what you're doing.
Question: is there any harm being done to the sites you frame? Have you gotten any negative feedback from publishers? Everynow and then someone frames one of my sites and it irks me to no end, hence the little js breaker i run on all my sites. Thoughts there? I mean, essentially one could argue this is merely a slick little theft of content.
I was a beta user of this and when Zach first launched his site I left him a voice mail saying how awesome it was.
The problem: I left my congratulations for the site featured on Worthyy instead of the Worthyy site itself. Oops.
I love Woot (there's a Woot off today btw) and I really like this site. I think it appeals to the masses much better than a delicious or stumbleupon. One site. One day.
One suggestion: Prominently display the URL of the site you are showcasing. I suggest the title bar and/or your worthyy bar.
I like the idea.
Cool idea. Please make it sensible for the user (me) to understand that I have to turn JS on to use the site.
The Safari bug was announced. I like the idea, but I wish there was a method of letting users index featured sites (tagging or the like) to help people find related sites.
Awesome idea - I love it.
I'd just recommend making the design of the discussion page/layout a little nicer.
Add an RSS feed. I doubt I would visit worthyy.com everyday to see what new site is being highlighted, but I'd definitely take a look if it showed up in my feed reader.
Uh yeah, that already exists:
http://www.stumbleupon.com/toolbar/ (random page)
This won't take off at all. If you still want to pursue this idea, least you could do is add a top iframe with some info on the site, comments, etc..
Edit: well, you said in your original comment that there would be a frame, but it doesn't seem to work on the current page that is displayed. (safari, mac)