Ask HN: Would you mind giving me your feedback on one of my main sideproject? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Would you mind giving me your feedback on one of my main sideproject?

11 pointsConcours20 comments

Dear Hackers, I'm sbout to go public beta with my sideproject http://www.mcsquare.me and I'm looking for some feedback to improve the public beta 1 of the service and the roadmap. I'm looking for any kind of feedback, regarding the design, the readability and of course the features of the site, and whatever you think should be improve. thanks

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My frist impression was that it looks very much like one of these spam sites.. I guess the adwords taking up most of the screen property above the fold give that impression. The add looks too much like the rest of the site for me. I know that this will drive clicks, but it doesn't make me want to get back to the site again.

2. the text is barely readable. I've got a perfect eyesight, but small white letters on dark background + small line heights make it hard to read.

3. What's up with the title? When I see a site entitled "Free RSS feed.." (Chrome doesn't display more in the tab title) I automatically classify this site as one of the "Free Icons", "Free Screensavers" etc. sites. You should move "McSquare" to the begginning of the title.

4. I like the image view of news (Onion & Twitter)

And here are some more comments. This is a screenshot of when I first entered your site. Notice how little usable information is on the page and how much does the ad take.

http://img.skitch.com/20101017-eq5huu5yhm6egmby4p7p6ys8c4.jp...

Overall: - Looks too much like a spam site - I wouldn't switch from Reddit & HN to read the news on your site - Good view of news images.

Hope I didn't kill your enthusiasm :)

hmm, thanks for the feedback, you are right about those Ads, and many feedback suggest the same, I'll move them a couple of rows down, and I'll most probably have only one ad text block (if at all).

2.fully agree with you, that's one of the issues coming back from the feedback as well, I'm still playing around to find the best font fit (any font hacker around?)

3. Having Mcsquare as the first word in the title is very bad for my SEO efforts, and the title (Free RSS Feed...) is mainly for SEO to tell search engines what the site is about, when the site gain some momentum and establish, I'll just use the brand name (Mcsquare) as title, with a couple of words, I have to agree that it doesn't read very well for a human, now, search engines tend to understand another language.

4.Glad you like it.

Saw the image, love your feedback, :) , I'll work on the design and improve it, (more colors, better font, more fun...)

Overall: I think after implementing the great suggestions here, the site should fairly look much much better and less spammy. The site will not try to take you over from reddit or HN, they are both great sites, and mcsquare is not doing the same thing (what you find on mcsquare isn't what you will find on reddit or HN), both offer random stories submitted by users, mcsquare pick the best sources of the web , from every niche and offer their latest stories, and more, so you could use Reddit, HN and mcsquare, since they offer different things.

Thanks for the great feedback again and No, you haven't kill my enthusiasm. :)

Since I use adblocking I did not see ads, but I still got that impression. I guess it is the "wall of images on the bottom" that looks like many imagehoster sites' ads.

Working on it to make the site look less like a place with ads and to improve the design (this should solve the problem).

* Navigation below the logo: the font is as dark as the border with too less padding. Perhaps some other style would work.

* Too small font for the new headlines

* The ads on the above are a huge distraction. I would suggest not having ads (atleast initially). Hint: Monetizing small sites with ads isn't going to work out to a large amount.

* You have pagination for a news aggregator. Feature suggestion: Why not a page that allows users to pick whatever news they want to read?

* "rss-feeds-talk", not something anyone would prefer. Why not just call it "comments" or something simpler?

* The separator between news headlines is as bright as the news headline. Would look good if the contrast of the separator is somewhere between that of the page background and the font color of the news headline/topic.

* How are you picking the news headlines for the news update ticker at the top of the site? I would suggest customising it according to users. Have a like button (not the facebook like button. just one for your site) and also use the data as to which topic the user comments on to personalize news. Add those headlines to the ticker.

Since you posted it here for review, I assume you are ready to take both good points and in-the-face criticism. So if you want a frank opinion, it looks like popurls.com with a little more ads. Perhaps you could take a little design inspiration from that site and add a little more features that differentiates yours from their app. There's also another similar app called Alltop run by Guy Kawasaki. Check that out too for some design inspiration. Another really cool news app is Dooblebuzz (http://doodlebuzz.com) by Brendan Dawes. This one has a really off-beat experimental interface that it fun to use.

But if it's a fun project. This is nice. The design needs polishing.

P.S: This is way better than my first site, which had 50 html pages with inline styles and dark green background, and was supposed to be an online bookstore :) Not to mention I even wanted to dropout of school to launch it.

Thanks for the feedback GreenM0nk ,working to improve the site with the feedback here.

several things come to my mind watching the site:

1. i could not figure out, what exactly the site is about. please write a short sentence or paragraph, on what users can expect.

...i just saw that you have this information in the title tag. put it in the header somewhere . your users will thank you.

2. you use caps for the main navigation and have 13 nav items. the nav items are very hard to read (and there´s no space between the text and the borders). capitalizing only the first letters would help a lot. regarding that there are many items (and subitems) perhaps it would be better to put the navigation in a left sidebar.

3. you use tahoma for text and content. serif fonts are hard to read (on screens). if you wanna have serif fonts, use them for headlines and serifless fonts for content. again you users will thank you.

4. there is the date in the top right. most users will know which is today´s. so it will distract many users from the real content.

5. in the top top navigation there are options for font size, background color,... i´d remove all of these and carefully set typography and colors that they fit most users needs.

6. like this buttons: the images are cut out from a white background, so there are those little white pixels left on the edges. though this is a very smallish issue it gives the users the impression that this is an unprofessional site. i guess you don´t want that :)

7. using adwords is ok, but putting ads (and no content) in the very center looks like you wanna make a quick buck and are not at all interested in providing real information/benefit. users immediately sense that and i guess about 90% of your visitors will leave the site. if you wanna make money out of this, you should get more creative. (extra tipp: making money from adwords works quite bad today)

8. generally read some articles on design and best practices. this will help you improve your site(s) more than you might think.

martin

Thanks a lot for the great feedback Martin, I'll finally go with a redesign of the whole site and carefully pick fonts and colors with a new approach.

Adwords will be a very tiny amount of my revenues and I'll consider not using them at all, and probably will not use them on the main release, but they are really a very tyni part on my business model.

Nice site overall - looks like you put a lot of time and effort into it.

The only thing I would point out is that the site looks kind of "busy" to me. In some ways it looks like a clone of a lot of other aggregators out there, or a site for a parked domain.

Maybe more whitespace? More colors? Make it fun?

Prooost! :P

yup, a lot of time indeed, thanks.

Ok, I took my design inspiration from the nytimes, but it seems like, it doesn't fit well with the site's layout, I'll improve the design, means more colors and whitespace, this should make it fun and less...cold or less work and research tool. Thanks

Prooost! :)

One small thing I noticed is that selecting a white background on the main screen doesn't "stick" when you choose news/america.

Another small UI thing: the choice of large font is welcome, but didn't go as large as I wanted. When I used command-+ on Chrome (Mac) to go a bit larger, I ended up with horizontal scrollbars. This is a pet peeve of mine. Why can't you use percentage measures for the different regions? I don't mind some vertical scrolling, but horizontal is much worse.

Edit: I forgot to say: Nice job overall, despite my nit picking above. Also, where did the name come from?

Edit 2: The title of the news / america section comes out as "Amerika". Is that just a typo, or a political statement? (I've seen that spelling used to imply the U.S. is being taken over by Facists or something.)

The white background issue is a bug, I'll fix it today, I somehow miss that one.

Indeed the font issue is a problem I have to figure out how to solve, I'm playing around with some fonts , but haven't yet found the perfect fit , so you won't even need to change the font size, if it doesn't work, I will have to change the approach and probably go with your suggestion on percentage measures. Thanks for the great critic and the nice words on the product.

clickable: http://www.mcsquare.me/

EDIT: Oh, forgot to tell you about the name, I'm a fan of Einstein ( E=mc² = mcsquare ) and bought the domain to create a twitter alike board for my University (Mecanical Eng.), but I find out, it wasn't a great idea, so as I switched to this project, the domain was just perfect for me, and here's the logic: site handle about rss feeds, Einstein was a very smart guy, ----> Tag line: Feed (from feeds) your brain (be smart with all theose infos like )---> feed your brain with all the latest news and knowledge.

Amerika is a typo, this happen when one write too much German stuff, "ca" is mostly "ka" in German, updating it now.

Could you point me to the "Amerika" url? I'm still missing it!

I don't like the ad locations, sure you want to make a bit of money out of it but to me it just on first glance has the feel of a made for adsense spam site. I would leave the first row ad free and put the 2 ad blocks in the right most column of the second and third rows.

got it, I'll remove the ads from the top left position, of course that's one of the best place for Adrevenues , but since the user experience is horrible with the ads staying there, I'll move them somewhere else, I'll try your suggestions. Thanks

There seems to be a problem with the database connection; "Warning: mysql_connect() [function.mysql-connect]: Lost connection to MySQL server at 'reading initial communication packet', system error: 111 in /home/djachao/mcsquare/connect.php on line 2 connection failed"

It's really slow and the images don't seem to load. Also, remove the advertising for 6 months. If you get users, then you can add it back in.

Great approach, I'll try it this way, if they don't work later, I will just remove them. Thanks

reminds me of http://popurls.com and http://alltop.com

the menu at top reminds me of alltop, and the layout of the feeds reminds me of popurls.

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