

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

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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kolinko
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...](http://img.skitch.com/20101017-eq5huu5yhm6egmby4p7p6ys8c4.jpg)

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 :)

~~~
aw3c2
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.

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

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GreenM0nk
* 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.

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

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sirwitti
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

~~~
Concours
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.

------
invertedlambda
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

~~~
Concours
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! :)

------
phr
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.)

~~~
Concours
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.

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

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robryan
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.

~~~
Concours
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

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p0ppe
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"

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petervandijck
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.

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

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andrewtbham
reminds me of <http://popurls.com> and <http://alltop.com>

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

