Quote:
Originally Posted by Creadiv
From akula's description I was expecting a peice of garbage wrapped in crap, but it really isn't that bad at all.
I will start with the pro's.
The functionality of the site seems great. The site works well, and is easy to navigate. I got to the site and immediatley knew how to use it. There wasn't a strange interface that made it difficult or confusing. When I clicked on stuff it worked and I received a pleasant error message if a subject was empty. You do have the ability to compete in this area.
The cons are that the design is terrible, you need to have somebody create professional graphics for you. Nobody will ever take your site seriously until it looks like a serious site. You should make your bold text a little smaller so that titles aren't running over to the next line. You should remove the word classifieds from each states classifieds section because it is just too much text. Fix the margins on your search bar in the left most column. Take some of the stuff off the front page. The site is just too long. Your users will most likely never scroll down far enough to see all of the listings.
Other than that the site looks pretty good. I wish you good luck in the future.
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Well I believe the creator wants to utilize the Craigslist "ugly marketing" concept which worked well considering it CL is a site that defeated the marketing rule of thumb of extensive graphics and falshiness. The problem with finding success off of the CL concept is that the reason Craigslist is on top, is because Craigslist is widely familiar and accepted brand like Google.
For you to compete you need to market the brand. the domain name is very catchy, and you're going to need to create an identity for it.
Search the net for as many affordable advertising venues as well as free advertising opportunities that gets tons of traffic. Also, go to websites that will offer affordable advertising packages that will naturally get credible traffic from habitual online consumers. One major example are people who search for apartments, homes, and townhomes online...especially those searching for apartments (simply because they return to the search for residential properties much more frequently due to the nature of apt. rentals, vacancy rates etc.). People who are looking for apts, for example, will also be looking for furniture (sell and/or buy), pets, roommates, whatever else.
Craigslist.com was a hit because it was the first of this kind where the user can search for a ton of stuff and any kind of stuff at cheap cheap prices, and easily without all the fluff of an expensive website. As well, people can easily sell their stuff much easier than they could through eBay and other online auctions.
Craigslist was simply the new classifieds of the Internet without, again all of the "fluff" of eBay and expensive sites. It got so much traffic and it's name so interesting that it was brought up in the news and so forth.
U can do the exact same thing, just depending on how you play the "name game" as I call it. Ironically, I find that the "catchier" and more "fun" the name is, the more attention and business it'll drive.
I wonder if there was a study just based on names from a marketing aspect. Would McDonald's make as much money if it was called "Frederick's"? Would Google not do as well if it was called, "UltimateSearch.com" (After all Google is the leading search engine...)? Think about it.
I'm kinda tired, so I will explain more later.
The NEXT Craigslist
