Smith on VoIP was extremely complimentary calling TMCnet the King of all VoIP Sites. Thank you Garrett. He wrote a blog entry discussing the TMCnet redesign I mentioned yesterday. Generally the comments about the new look have been good. I haven’t had a chance to go through all of them yet though. A few people think we need more color and others suggest more thumbnail photos.
What is interesting about what we have done is the choice we have given users. There are menus on top, to the right and also boxes which can be clicked on to give specific news such as VoIP, CRM, IMS, etc. The settings are sticky so if you want IMS news at the top, you can come back to TMCnet later (assuming you have cookies enabled) and see only IMS news. The same goes for VoIP, etc.
What we haven’t done however is make most of the decisions for you.
This is what I mean. On most news sites there are a few top stories at the top that guide the reader to what the site editors thinks is most important. This is what newspapers do and magazine publishers do in print magazines such as Internet Telephony or IMS Magazine.
I like our approach better because we don’t force the reader to look at 6 top stories. readers can customize the site as they like. You may be in an “IMS mood” if such a thing is possible (and if so you may want to seek some casual counseling
).
).The graphic box on the left does have a limited number (10 as of this writing) of images and sheer manpower prevents us from having infinite graphics to choose from.
The site has a learning curve and once you get the hang of it, it becomes infinitely more useful.
Still our design with all its flexibility is in the minority among news sites so part of me wonders if this is good or bad. The feedback lends me to believe most of the visitors like it this way but we may be instituting a survey soon to get a more formalized system of feedback from our community. Like I mentioned in my recent post, with almost 2 million visitors in a month we need to be very careful while always striving to improve. But on the other hand with such a massive online community we seem to be doing at least some things right.
Back to Garrett – he ends his post with the following:
I have to say, as a daily visitor I am extremely happy to see this re-design. Although, the site is jammed-packed with great information, previously it was almost too jam packed, leading to a less than desirable experience. This slick re-design, is subtle enough not to shock or scare daily visitors, making it easier to “take it all in.”
Thanks again to Garrett and our other loyal readers and visitors. We’ll keep improving as long as you keep visiting.
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