Bored of Boredom - Critique Please!

Hey!

Please can you take a look around www.boredofboredom.com and let me know what you think. In particular - useability and any ideas for content.

Thanks

Dean

 

Well i think it looks really good....looks like fun. Only downside is it loads really, really slow.

 

Thanks for the good comments . About the slow loading, where abouts are you based? I know the homepage is fairly big but I've not had any problems so far.

 

The site looks nice, I like the fact that it's updated once a week, this will keep
your visitors coming back. I think the site would be better if you added a forum
to it, to allow your visitors to chat when they are feeling bored.

 

Thanks for your comments . A forum is an idea we've had, but I was going to wait until I have a good amount of visitors before I added one. I hate seeing empty forums myself, so I wanted to make sure I'd have enough people that'd see it before starting one. What do you think?

 

That makes perfect sense.

 

Awesome . Anyone else got any comments?

 

Ok guys, we've just uploaded a short preview podcast. If anyone could give it a quick listen (it's 7 mins) and let me know what you think, that'd be awesome. The URL is www.boredofboredom.com/podcast.html.

 

I think that this is a fairly original design. You don't see many of those anymore. I am a marketing guy, and I think you are on to something.

 

PS: The spam of the week is a cool idea. Also, invest in a wind screen for your microphone that you use for the podcast. Too much "breath" going on. A lot of people find that annoying.

 

The how to get rid of cold callers is classic. I have printed it out and put it on my desk. (I get a lot of these damned calls). Perhaps to encourage viewer participation, you might want to set it up so that people could make additions to the lists by emailing them to you. For example, in the past I have pretended to be a police officer at a crime scene. That one works well.

Amassing a list like that will keep people coming back, and in the new web 2.0 era participation isn't everything, it is the only thing!

 

Stallican, thanks for all your comments (rep added)! The problem with the mic will be fixed next week, part of the reason we did this preview was to check everything was working ok, so I'm glad it popped up now rather than later.

As for the participation in the top 3, etc, we're going to try and push that via the podcast, as well as a link on the page to email. I'm hoping people will listen and then email us, I can't think of another way around it. If you have any ideas, please please let me know!

We're hoping to open a forum once we've got a good base of visitors to start it up, hopefully that will help. We're also going to start selling ORIGINAL tshirts. We've come up with a few good slogans to put on them so far, but we're going to hold out again until we've built a reputation for the site (if you want a quick look at what we've got so far, feel free to PM me). I'll post on here again when it's online.

We've also started a Facebook group, which is gaining more members every day. Everyone that joins the group does seem to visit the site, so that's a bonus (if you want to join, it's here).

Anyone got any other comments? I really appreciate input and would love a few different points of view on the site.

 

I would prefer you to place the "update and stuff" box to the top so that people can know things about your site first ( e.g. update, something new). Besides it's better to have a navigation bar(or main menu) so that people can explore your site faster as well as lowering the possibility to turn away(some people may interested only in arcade and if they missed it they would probably gone forever).

 

Thanks for the comments (rep added). The reason the updates are at the bottom is exactly the reason you said to put them at the top. All the links to all different pages are the first thing the users see (along with the 'to do' list - telling them where to go). The arcade link is at the top as I know that a lot of people will come purely to play the games.

Would be good to hear if anyone agrees with putting the updates at the top though. Anyone?

 

No offence mate not really my style of arcade

 

What don't you like about it? How could it be improved?

 

Hi Again. While it makes sense to address the updates to the list in your podcast. If your site behaves the way that most others do it would be better to have it in the form of YouTube video or page that can be commented on.

The reason for this is that about 29% of people in the US will watch a video, while only 11% will listen to a podcast. It seems to me that bored people might also like video a little better. It is more entertaining (at least to me).

These numbers are accurate as of 3-6 months ago, but you can get the idea.

 

PS: These numbers are higher / lower depending on where in the world you are (ie Asia is different than the US which is also different than Canada). But I bet the gap is pretty similar.

 

I'm going to look into embedding comments on the podcast page (and the top 3 page, so that users can add to each list), I like the idea of that.

We used to create videos as part of a different project, but it's a lot more time consuming and harder for us to do as we all need to be together. With a podcast, we can each be at home and still get it recorded each week.

 

Yes, video is a bit tougher. Keep it in mind for long term though. It pays good rewards for both traffic and visitor loyalty.