Comment by devmonk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by devmonk | Hacker News Reader

Some thoughts:

- Domain/name sounds somewhat awkward, which is not good for a place to get news.

- favicon looks rough.

- The front page is unfortunately a wreck, UI/UE-wise.

-- Don't use scrollover/hover to highlight part of main page name like some exciting link when it is just a link back to the main page.

-- Remove "Top Technology Memes". You don't need it.

-- Reduce unimportant UI elements by removing the icon next to where the link goes to and the site where the link goes to above each headline.

-- Story title on one line, text on the next. Don't start text on the headline line.

-- Text should probably not be in black because it is competing with the headline being blue and standing out. Pick one or the other to stand out if you must have both. I think the headline by itself is enough.

-- Get rid of the myriad of links to all the sites it came from under the headline and text.

What you have left unfortunately is a lackluster list of headlines, but basically- that is the gist of what you are providing currently. If you are trying to be google news, have categories, etc.

Why not pull content into the page dynamically via Ajax pushing the headlines down as soon as they come in?

Think about this: what is the feature (not content) that will distinguish you from every other site like this on the web?

Thanks for the great feedback.

Your spot on about the UI/UE, it is a serious weak point. It is a pretty big gap in my own skill set (which by iterating on this site, I am hoping to improve).

I think the core competency of the site is meme tracking for a given vertical category. Given that, the thought is additional features can be added that leverage the memes.

Some examples I am thinking of short term:

-Which memes are having the biggest impact on social networks (in terms of "tweets", "likes", "diggs", etc..).

-What media, such as videos and images, are associated with a particular meme.

Longer term:

-Given a list of sites and article I track on say, Google Reader, only show me the entries which are part of significant memes.

-What memes are my friends "liking", "tweeting", or "digging", etc...

-Topic search which returns memes rather than single articles.

The overarching plan is to release early, and often -- and hopefully to update the folks here at Hacker News to make a good feedback loop.

Thanks!

You have some good thoughts on it, and your plan to get input is great. But, I think you need to continue thinking outside of the box on this.

What you are saying you want it to do is the cliche of existing sites out there that do social link promotion or link/news aggregation (regardless of whether there is a great logic to how you are pulling those stories, etc.). There is no value add significant enough in anything you are listing there to make me want to visit the site at all, much less with any frequency.

You need something significantly new or niche about the site. If you are looking for a challenge, surprise me (and everyone else) and come up with an idea that I'd be interested in that I've not heard before. I know this sounds harsh, but better now than later.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com