You can never win when you review a directory for a wide variety of reasons not least the owners ability to take critique. However in this case the owner asked me to review his three directories and that I’ll do. As usual I’m simply going to be honest and impartial. I’m deliberately going to avoid mentioning what scripts they use because to me that’s irrelevant even though important at the same time. Besides, I’d be called bias simply because of my clear allegiance to the phpLynx script.

I don’t use the tools webmasters can use such as FasterFox which uses pre-fetching methods because I believe (and statistics support me) that the ordinary user still rely on internet explorer with just over 80% of the browser market. I want directory owners to understand that the critique I offer is not to condemn their site to ridicule by their peers, its to show you how perhaps an ordinary member of the public, the potential customer is going to see your site. If my reviews are criticised for anything they shouldn’t be criticised for putting the customer first which is the aim of this.

So to the task in hand…

The directory is the relatively new Web Links Directory that was set up in September 2007. Initial thoughts on it was that it was fairly fast loading, not too overbearing and basically doing what it says it does.

Tech Specs:

Download Times*

Excellent news, the site passes the speed test in that it loads within that golden 5-8 second period where users are likely to stay with the site. (I’ve highlighted the speed in bold). As I mentioned above, I don’t care about webmasters accessing sites using superfast tools, my aim is to replicate the ordinary web user, I’ve done this and as a potential customer I’m likely to stay at this site now.

CSS Validation - Passed - This is a always good news as anything that may help indexing by the engines can’t be bad. There’s no definitive proof just yet that w3c validation does help with Google indexing a site but preliminary results are looking promising.

HTML Validation - Failed - There were a surprising 68 errors that came up here which although not devastating to the what the reader can see should still be addressed and will certainly help with load speed and efficiency of indexing by the search engines.

Design:

I thought the logo was slightly hard to read, but this may be a personal thing, I don’t think there’s any need to use that style of font unless its absolutely necessary. Yes it does look pretty but its not taking into account the visitor. I asked four people in my office to look at the logo and pass comment, every one of them said that the font made it harder to read. Keep it simple is the motto, your logo should be legible at all times, it should also fit in with the rest of the site. The use of the slogan could have been better, a simple use of the word ‘The’ would have made it more impactive, so instead of reading ‘Internet Library’ it would read ‘The Internet Library’. Which one reads the best?

One thing a colleague picked up on was the ‘About’ in the header. She said to me ‘About what?’ I honestly never paid that much attention to this before but she was right! It should tell the reader what the ‘About’ is about! (Sorry for the poor English there). In this case the ‘About’ was about the site, the owner and so on. I’m not going to comment on the ‘about us’ page, it needs to be changed but to avoid standardisation I’ll speak to the site owner on that.

You can’t really pass too much comment on the header except to say its okay, it does its job and doesn’t take away from the main body which is key. The main body has several problems with it, I don’t know what relevancy the blue cogs have to the directroy theme? They certainly don’t fit in that’s for sure. The logo uses Blocks, perhaps use of a similar style instead of these cogs would make the site theme more uniformed?

There’s overuse of sub categories which even lends to duplication in the trailing …’s Hover over them and you’ll see that they link to the main category therefore duplicating content on the page. There’s also no need to use as many sub categories, three is pretty much the industry standard. Using this method not only tidies up the page but could also prevent the need to scroll to see the full page. Scrolling on a front page to me is pretty much a no-no, it goes against web usability and is seen by many as one of the worst design mistakes you can make. These day’s its not so much of an issue but only if you have the important text of your site at the top without the need to scroll.

That’s not the case in this design, you simply have to scroll to get to the rest of the categories. Taking away a few sub categories from each main one could eliminate this. I’m not a big fan of link counters either, and although we use them for Cantufind.com’s directory they aren’t used on the front page. I think it would be fair to say that most good directories avoid using them until at least the inner pages.

To the side tables. Here the owner has replicated a portion of the main directory categories, this combined with the … duplication means that certain categories are actually linked three times on the same page! Ignoring the fact that it triplicates the categories it also has potential problems. I clicked on the ‘Blogs’ link seeing that it was one of the most ‘popular’ categories? There was only one link in the entire section so how can it be one of the most popular? Never dig a hole for yourself when it comes to promoting something, if your going to do so then you should always make sure you at least have something to promote. This space may well prove valuable later down the line when the directory actually has some links in the most popular but until then that feature really needs to be taken out.

Listing of the day: I could have sworn that this has been there for more than one day? Again it is important to keep on top of gimmicks like this. Even if your simply making the choice yourself, make sure you keep on top of this feature by making it a daily task to change the link, it only takes seconds.

A perfect example to support my comment on bad design regarding scrolling is that the links there are going to be the most valuable resource this directory has. Granted that the article link has no articles in it yet but when it does people won’t see them because they won’t be bothered to scroll down the page to see the link. The latest listings is about the only page that really offers any content as yet so take advantage of this, put the link at the top or even better the side bar where the replicated categories are. Good design always dictates important content must always be at the top or at least in the main body. Take some tips from this link here. It’s as old as the hills but these design tips still stand as important today as they did the day the author wrote them.

Finally my pet hate, (and Google’s by the look of things). Linking to bad neighbourhoods. You can dress up the links as much as you like, that won’t fool Google. In this case there’s ’supported by Alive’ then the live link ‘Web Directory’. Rightly or wrongly, these sites are in the hot seat of hate when it comes to sitewide linking so avoiding them at all costs is a must. The linking is probably totally innocent but do you really want to run the risk of being tarred with the same brush as Alive and others? If you have to use them because they provided the template either free or on condition they get a link at least make sure you put a no-follow attribute to the links. That way your doing both you and the link owners a favour by breaking the ‘neighbourhood‘ up without preventing advertising your benefactors.

Summary:

There’s no doubt about it, the site is raw, its new, its empty, but it has promise like the many thousands of directories out there. With a few tweaks here and there paying attention to the points I’ve made above, there is no reason whatsoever you can’t go on to make this a success. Lots of work is needed on getting links but that goes for any directory, but in my mind first impressions count. My first impression was it was okay, now lets go make it ‘WoW!.