To compliment the sites that are lucky enough to get listed in our general directory, and to perhaps help promote some of the strong points of their website that perhaps the description, title, or keywords won’t show you we’ve decided on providing every site that gets listed with us a complimentary review of their site.

The reviews will be as brief as possible but also ensuring that we get across what we believe to be the main or unique selling points of the particular site. An example of a review can be found here. What you’ll notice from these reviews is that we provide the site with their logo, if they have one, hyperlinks to key areas of the website that may otherwise not be reached without searching, together with as many contact details as we can obtain.

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Posted By admin
Jun 23, 2008

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.

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Posted By admin
Apr 21, 2008

Following our recent blogs on directory design and integrity I was asked if I’d do a review, and whether good or bad, that we could publish it. We did take the time to notify the directory owner who might by the time you get to read this review have dealt with most if not all of the issues. That’s assuming he wants to.

Thanks go out to the owner of the Directory under review Jude, ( better know as popotalk)

Dirsensei Web Directory
TECHNICAL DATA: Speed of loading (nb: There can be a fluction on download times). for further information on this use the same software that I did here.

Connection Rate Download Time
14.4K - 117.02 seconds
28.8K - 60.01 seconds
33.6K - 51.86 seconds
56K - 32.32 seconds
ISDN 128K - 11.98 seconds
T1 1.44Mbps - 3.78 seconds

This is not good. The general consensus within the design industry for many years suggest that a website should load within 5-8 seconds or risk losing potential visitors. Not everyone has ISDN, in fact most still have good old fashioned cable so its critical you get your site to load as fast as possible without compromising on quality. This site had 13 images in it which can either be optimized or reduced. The test I ran suggested replacing graphic rollovers with CSS rollovers to speed display and minimize HTTP requests amongst other things.

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Posted By admin
Apr 8, 2008