Ask HN: Feedback Please - TapInko.com

Poor colour choices, inconsistent fonts and poor and inconsistent layout decisions preclude it from looking professional. It all feels a bit 90s and clunky, frankly, and would put me off using your site.

Grey buttons in the top-right look incredibly tacky and don't match the rest of the site. The entire black-to-grey gradient strikes me as a bad idea, especially as white-on-black text isn't something business websites generally do. Navigation and how people use the site is generally poorly thought out (although the map is decent enough), and relies too much on clunky search functionality with poor usability, especially when you have so little content. The use of overflow: auto for the results instead of letting it go down the page is a poor design decision and that, combined with the "register" popup, reminds me of a spam site rather than a legitimate company. I'd have a serious rethink about most aspects of the design, with a combination of looks and usability in mind.

As others have commented, using browser sniffing to block access to your site is extremely bad form, not least for the simple reason that you'll never be able to keep up with browser variations and end up with annoyed users. I remember the problems it caused 10 years ago with the browser wars. Get rid of it, support the 5 major browsers and assume that everything else is out of your hands.

When you visit the site, you've got a lot of space going "Advertising made easy", "The advertising marketplace" and even "Register Today!" text, but what you really need is a box summarising exactly what your service actually does rather than using vague slogans. The fact I had to click through to understand fully the purpose of the site is a bad sign.

Homepage has too much nagging to register without a clear value proposition or explanation of the site's purpose. It isn't clear what the service is from the overly broad homepage taglines: "Advertising Made Easy" and "The Advertising Marketplace". (The domain name doesn't convey either but it is brandable). I'd tighten that tagline into something more specific and compelling.

You might want to start by focusing on a specific geographic market (i.e. Philly) or vertical (i.e. political ads) or type of advertising (i.e. print) or even just college papers and expand from there. (I bet a lot of consumer product companies would advertise in college papers if it was easier to do) Newspaper or radio remainders would be good now that Google is exiting.

The calenders don't work in FF 3. Also, white text on a black background is tough to read and is unprofessional to me. The FAQ page javascript is an annoying and unneeded interface.

Happy hunting and let us know how it goes!

My only recommendation: I'd like to see what the My Inko control panel will look like before I decide to sign up for an account.

Since this is the internet and advertising is everywhere, seeing the words "advertisement" don't really tell me anything. Is it online? Print? Billboards? Your home page doesn't say.

You need to make it extremely clear what you're selling and to whom--something like "Buy Real-world ads online."

Poking around a bit, my only suggestion so far is to make the text font size bigger on some of the text-heavy pages (FAQ) and make the line lengths shorter. Lines of text should be around 65 characters long.

That is my biggest complaint. I have no idea what this is all about unless I dig deeper (which most people won't do).

http://www.tapinko.com/images/thedudes.jpg

:)

Also, you misspelled "Worcester" in the description of "The Towers" at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts.

"Search returned 1 results:" takes up a TON of screen real estate relative to the total area allocated for search results. Using the back button breaks search results filtering (at least state-based) - look at how Mint elegantly handles this use case.

Something about the spacing or presentation of the search results is irritating to me but I can't put my finger on what. The resulting pricing pages, by contrast, are quite nice and present the information in a coherent way.

When I see the screen there isn't any statement containing information about the site. I see the info in the browser's title but not on the page.

The page doesn't fit in a 1024x786 monitor. Site gets an F(37) in yslow (too many files). Not a big fan of inner scrollbars when clicking on a state, it would be better to utilize the browser window's scrollbars. No easy way to go back to the map unless I click home again.

The login bar clutters up the screen. Might be better as a popup dialog.

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.0.5) Gecko/2008122010 Iceweasel/3.0.6 (Debian-3.0.6-1)

The results to be specific, they don't tell me much without reading for more than 10 seconds, try showing ad rates, available slots, etc.

You could at least give some way to ACK the message and go ahead anyway, without fiddling with user agent settings.

It would be nice to be able to easily compare the rate cards of different publications.

I looked in my area (Ohio) and you seem to have multiple listings for the same person. The college newspapers and other local rags are a great idea.

Since the words are already a blue hyperlink, you can probably leave off "Click here."

Thanks,

- Pete Groverman - Pgroverman@tapinko.com

Some things about the venture:

1) We have an executed agreement with The Greater Media Group of Freehold NJ, they have begun creating profiles for their different outlets

2) We are based out of Philadelphia

3) Our goal is to make advertising...easy

4) Buyers of Adspace can use their same account to also become Sellers of Adspace (ie. a restaurant desires to place an advertisement but also sell advertisements in their menus)

5) How We Differentiate from Google Print Ads: http://www.phillypreneurs.com/2009/02/david_vs_gooliath/

6) If you have a publication or outlet that you would like to sell advertising on (even as a sticker on the back of your computer) please feel free to make a profile.

7) Business Model: No setup costs, no annual subscription fees, we charge only 7% per completed transaction to the seller. This charge includes all banking fees and credit card costs.

Thanks,

-Pete