Hi Members,

Please review the site www.go4i.net. It was launched on March 2004 and went on well and had a server crash and its back. Please review and if possible support the community grow and share your technology discussions.

URL : http://www.go4i.net/
FORUM : http://www.go4i.net/forum

Regards,
Vinay

Good job, Vinay.
I like it, the design, the content, the "most read story", the survey.

Maybe do more with the forums on the front page than just a simple image link. Maybe...

# of posts today.
link to the most popular post of the day.
link to the newest (original) post.
link to the latest post with a poll.


Given the weakness of the "come-and-get-it" paradigm, the vast majority of your visitors will not return to "just a website", even when they intend to.
The "those who like it enough will come back" posture is a prayer too seldom answered positively. A very small percentage of websites get the vast majority of web traffic.

This means a few things. One, you would do well to make forums more central to your offering.

An example:

A forum category for "downloads" and a link on each download in the library to "read the N posts in this forum about this download"
And somehow solicit forum posts from people who do download, ideally 1 day, 2 days, 7 days later.

Actively, manually, search for content about each download and post messages yourself to links to what you find.


Another example:

The "comments?" link on each story is good. I'm guessing that
creates forum-like posts when the person is logged in.
Maybe include the current count in the link
when = 0 "make comment"
when = 1 "read comment"
when > 1 "N comments"

Another example:

What if every N visits to your home page ( and certainly only once per day per visitor ) you asked a question before going to the home page...

"What's on your mind? "
give 3 or 4 current-event-topic choices ( that you change very often )
and .. "I want to read the news"
and .. "I want to read (my favorite?) the forums"
and .. other

If they select a topic or other, they get a box to type .. and it becomes a post in a forum. The "what's on your mind" might end up being your most trafficed forum.

Again, the idea is to make the forums be more central to your offering. Forums still seem to be about the best (popular) way to go beyond the anonymous-random-surfer/publisher level of relationship and build an audience.

If you are interested in a new way to build an audience that's complementary to what you have, but not popular yet, send me email or PM. :-)


My last suggestion is select and know your target market.
It could be a coincedence, but the day I visited (today)
most of the front page stories deal with games. Games are fine.
Gamers are a large group, to be sure. But they are typically
a fairly young crowd.

The reason that's important is the rest of the site has a very spartan,
straight forward, no-nonsense look and tone - one that gamers probably
find boring.

Put another way, think of it as a 3 legged stool. Your content, your tone and your target. To be successful, you must have all three legs of the stool congruent with one another. Same length, same color, same shape, etc.
This is a case when 2 out of 3 will mean failure.

If you think your target is "people who like technology", my question is what do you have special that the many larger, more established, better funded players don't have?

A better target is a special subset of that.
Which target, is up to you.
What content appeals to them, is up to them to decide, you to discern.
What tone resonates with them is also for you to discern.


Good luck !



p.s. I didn't mean to imply that this is *easy*. It certainly is not. These are the exact issues I'm tackling now as I hone my own message and software offering from "everyone online" to a more effective subset that can be targeted.