Hello. A new relationship site based upon spirituality has been started. Before I outlay for promotion I would welcome and suggestions or criticisms of www.LinkSouls.com. Please note, this is not an overt sex site. It's about soul conenction as opposed to disposable relationships or ones based mainly on the bonds of sex, power (control) and money. Having said that, if you dislike some of the tone of the site, then I would like to know. It is early stages.
Thank you for helping.

Craig

Quite a nice design. Backgrounds of your banners could be co-ordinated with the background colors of the page.

Re: LinkSouls.com

Hi Dave.
Thank you for your insight about backgrounds. This might go with
getting rid of the grey tones of the sight and making it warmer.


Cheers,

Craig

Craig,
I give you an "A" for concept, but an "F" for execution.
Seems to me like you have a "portal" with a links database ( I may have lost count, but you might be the 4,714,332nd one of those on the net ).

Regardless what you were thinking when you built the links database, nothing remotely resembling "soul", "linking" or "linking souls" or even relationships comes through.

If you want people to bookmark your portal so they can come back to you, you are going to have to give them a lot better reasons than you do.

One of the things almost 10 years of the web-centric universe has taught us is that "just a website" is a terrible way to have a long term relationship with an audience online.

It's simply too much to ask to expect even your fans to come back to your site over and over. They just won't set aside the time, expend the energy to even find the bookmark to you to revisit you.

Imagine if you tried to have a *relationship* with a person one on one, but you made them jump through those kinds of hoops in order to communicate with you. What hoops? Well, in your case, suppose you put a new FANTASTIC link in the database in the "weight loss" catagory.

What does your "homepage" show when your loyal fans show up?
Exactly the same content it showed yesterday, last week, last month!
( no WONDER they won't come back )
And if they do magically, by accident, click on the "weight loss" category?
Somewhere buried in the 179 links, is the new great one.

Can you say needle in a hay stack?

Not such a great way to have a "conversation" with your audience, right?

That's the equivalent your spouse saying to you,

"There's something important you should know. I want to tell you. Now.. ask me questions to figure out what it is."

How long would you stay married?

But you play hide-and-seek-communicate with your online audience and expect them to stay "married" to you? Forget about it. Not going to happen.
Even if they make a bookmark to you, they'll leave you because the relationship with you is ultimately unsatisfying.

It's not your fault. It's a number of design flaws built into the web itself working against you ( and everyone else who drank the kool-aid ).
90% of all web traffic goes to the top 5% of sites. And the number one thing they have in common is they spend MILLIONS on advertising to overcome the web's design flaws. Now, what are the rest of us going to do? Piddle around with our few thousand hits a month?

Phooey on that(tm)

There's a new way to communicate on the Internet, it solves the design flaws built into the web, email and instant messaging which means there's no spam, no viruses, no forgotten bookmarks, no audience size limitations.

Imagine publishing like a website, distributing like an email, grabbing attention like an instant message ... with the repetition and ease of use of a screensaver. All at the same time.

It's perfect for what you want to do with your link database.
You add a link to your database, it can be displayed as the "new thing" on the screens of all your members. Front and center, click, bang, done.
Instead of hiding in a pile of 179 other links that almost no one is going to see because almost no one is going to visit your old-fashioned website.
Imagine your brand as visible on your member's screens as their screensaver.
Your audience doesn't have to revisit your site, because your content flows to them. If they want your main page or a category page, it's visible and one click away.

You can read about it on my website, http://www.IwantFUI.org

Regards
Daniel Farfan

p.s. For all of you who are still drunk on the web kool-aid who think I'm nuts to propose that something that's not browser-based can matter...
Consider this fact.

No matter how wonderful your website is, it's out-of-sight, out-of-mind 10 minutes after the browser is closed. Period.

And you are going to piddle around thinking that a new font or a color scheme is going to matter? Phooey on that.

Dear Daniel,

I greatly appreciate the input you have given about LinkSouls.com


I will review your software carefully and get back to you in due course.

What you say makes a lot of sense.


Back later

Regards,

Craig Walter - Director

You are welcome, Craig.
You have a great domain name and theme, "new relationship site based upon spirituality"
I think we can work together.

Daniel Farfan

I'm not sure if I'm seeing the relationship site, it just looks like a web directory of links to me. Simple, clean design though, I like it.