Fear, owner of qoobe.org has implemented a new design. It was designed by Asim's (coolweb) team and coded by me Check the directory here and the blog here. IMO a custom design that looks good like this really benefits a directory. What are your views on this?
Design is good no doubt. Coding still needs improvement mike. @ Directory: Category names and things need better alignment. Moreover Category navigation is missing. Eg.: Home»Business»Internet».... @ Blog: Words go out of the boxes, again they need better alignment. One more @ dir: Pricing: Featured links $20 1 Month Regular links $7 1 Month ---- month needs to be changed to whatever!
Has a very nice look to it I notice that in the upper right is says offering FREE and paid listings however there is no FREE listing opion Also Isn't that fee per month a typo on the submit page? I have a couple sites listed there and they were one time fees for those same prices
Me too. Part of the new design and coding work we're talking about. Looks like it's still in Beta so far. Sometimes I wonder about the design being that important. My directories have always been particularily ugly, and have always been good earners. The design of "Qoobe" for instance has a distinctive "Web 2.0" style. I wonder how much that appeals to SEO/Webmaster types. In my opinion, many people are more concerned with whether your pages are indexed that if you're site is pretty. That said, I can't see how a nice design can hurt any website.
A decent design to me, means the owner is serious about running the project. When I see a free script, free template and/or a category dump I realize the person has put very little resources into the project so they have nothing to lose by not promoting/driving traffic to it.
I think Alexa and backlinks are a better indicator than the design, but I get what you're saying. If the design is bad enough to drive customers away then it deserves being upgraded.
Thanks everyone for the comments, there was an error in the submit page about the pricing which is now fixed. And as far as the coding errors are concerned it will be fixed soon
Oh well I guess everyone has a different rating system, when a directory is newish there may not be a lot of backlinks or a good Alexa rating but if I see that the owner is doing something unique and wise then I wil linvest in some reviews. I like to do it this way because most directories start off with low pricing.
Right. I still see the square white corners for each of the categories, and the RH column is shoved to the bottom. I will say that once everything gets cleaned up, this will be a very nice design!
The site is loading very slowly for me. Did you try it on Safari/Mac? Guess, I will have to use firefox.