Recently, I had the displeasure of rejecting a client whose website had a misleading domain name in comparison to what the site actually was. As the domain name is the first backbone of website search engine optimization, I was facing an impossible task. How was I to explain to Google what the site was when the site owner was already lying about it? But somehow the site owner was not able to understand this simple fact and accused me of failing to read his mind. Which is quite fine, since I will openly confess my lack of telepathic powers. Unfortunately, this lack of telepathic abilities extends to all human beings on this planet, which means that we must engage in the challenge of human communication, with all of its attendant difficulties.
One of the means of communication that we humans have devised is the late 20th centaury invention called a website. However, a website is less of a direct proclamation to fellow humans, and more like a polite guidance system designed to guide people in a certain direction. Just like mentors of olden times would guide trainees through hostile territory, away from cliffs and angry bears and toward prime hunting spots and safe camping areas, our websites guide our younger trainees on the frontiers of knowledge, away from lies and mistaken thinking and toward greater intellectual enlightenment. This produces something that roughly looks like this:
As human beings flow into your site from the broader internet, they will either stay on your website or leave it. If they chose to stay, however, they will page through multiple pages, and likely visit multiple times, before they decide to buy anything from you or click on any of your ads or affiliate links. They will have to make their peace with the fact that truth and information do not come free, at least not in full, and that your information is valuable enough to pay for. Therefore, what matters the most with your website is NOT your vision for your website or what you want your website to be, but how your website looks in the eyes of others and how well it serves the information needs of its visitors. The first requirement for being a successful webmaster is to get out of your own head and to be able to see things through the eyes of others.
And the easiest way to do so is to ask other humans what they think of your site, preferably ones that may need information that you have, and get their feedback on your website. In real life, wise mentors have to answer to other wise mentors, and webmasters are no different. Hence, website reviews (and why you should get one for your website). But there are other benefits too.
Suggestions to improve your website and moral character notwithstanding, people like to read website reviews, and over six thousand people search for them each month. Putting your site up for review has the potential to reach six thousand new visitors. It's a valid way to increase traffic and sales or ad revenue. Remember that most publicity is good publicity, and if the critics are particularly scathing, they have saved you months of waiting around for traffic that wasn't going to come. Don't take it personally.
With that said, it pays to submit your site to multiple sites that do website reviews. Multiple submissions will allow you to verify if your site is particularly deficient in an area or if you just had one reviewer who decided to be particularly brutal on you for some reason. It's also good from the promotion angle because you get your site name on more than one website in the website review space.
But maybe you've got it all wrong. Maybe the best place for your donate button is in a pop up when a user rolls their mouse off of your website and tries to leave. Maybe instead of selling your ebook with "Add to Cart" in the sidebar, you should give that ebook away as an incentive to sign up for your email newsletter - and then use that newsletter to promote your new online course. The flexibility of a site review allows for more qualitative and nuanced feedback than what preliminary tests can do, especially if you ran those tests inside your organization or with friends and family members.
If you had no idea what A/B testing was when you launched your site, this is all the more reason to get a review now. This will allow you to understand what parts of your site design you can improve, or which parts you can take to A/B testing as part of a redesign. This is covered under the First Impressions and Appearance sections of the Bizdustry review service.
While blogging classes exist, they are expensive. Even if you can afford one, students in a blogging class may not be in your niche and interested in what you're selling. A website review is a far better choice. The reviewer sees your writing in the context of your actual site so they have a better idea of what you're trying to accomplish with your content, and can give you sounder advice on how to improve it. This is covered in the Grammar and Spelling section and the Originality section of the Bizdustry review service. The reviewer will evaluate your site and content and how different it is from other sites.
For forums, it's worth looking at what content you've attracted from your users, almost more than the content that you have created. How active is your forum? What are the staff and user groups? Do they serve your users and make sense with your site and what you are trying to accomplish? It pays to have a second pair of eyes to evaluate your results. You may be comfortable on your forum, but are your users and staff members? Is this forum attractive to the broader Internet as a place that people want to join? There was no way for you to know this or test for this before your site launched, but now it can be evaluated by a reviewer and improved. This is covered in the Member/Forum Activity section and Staff User groups sections of the Bizdustry review service.
Fortunately, for most websites, change is a slow and gradual matter. But after a large and major change, it pays to get feedback on your website, to have it reviewed again and again. Think of this as simply the way to ensure that your message is getting through and that you are communicating with your audience properly, after their revulsion to change has passed and their emotions have calmed down. If you audience grows to a massive size it may be better to conduct an internal poll of your users, rather than burdening an external review service, but the principle remains the same. When guiding people, it pays to talk to them and turn a one-way conversation into a two-way one. Keep listening, keep talking, and you will not make the mistake of selecting and stubbornly holding onto a misleading and ineffective domain name, among many others.
UPDATE: As of 12/23/2023, the Bizdustry Review Service has been discontinued. However, if you want a review for your site, the Member Reviews and Brainstorming section remains open! While this forum provides a bit of a looser format for reviews, it's still a good place for webmasters to take advantage of for feedback on their sites. Thanks!
One of the means of communication that we humans have devised is the late 20th centaury invention called a website. However, a website is less of a direct proclamation to fellow humans, and more like a polite guidance system designed to guide people in a certain direction. Just like mentors of olden times would guide trainees through hostile territory, away from cliffs and angry bears and toward prime hunting spots and safe camping areas, our websites guide our younger trainees on the frontiers of knowledge, away from lies and mistaken thinking and toward greater intellectual enlightenment. This produces something that roughly looks like this:
As human beings flow into your site from the broader internet, they will either stay on your website or leave it. If they chose to stay, however, they will page through multiple pages, and likely visit multiple times, before they decide to buy anything from you or click on any of your ads or affiliate links. They will have to make their peace with the fact that truth and information do not come free, at least not in full, and that your information is valuable enough to pay for. Therefore, what matters the most with your website is NOT your vision for your website or what you want your website to be, but how your website looks in the eyes of others and how well it serves the information needs of its visitors. The first requirement for being a successful webmaster is to get out of your own head and to be able to see things through the eyes of others.
And the easiest way to do so is to ask other humans what they think of your site, preferably ones that may need information that you have, and get their feedback on your website. In real life, wise mentors have to answer to other wise mentors, and webmasters are no different. Hence, website reviews (and why you should get one for your website). But there are other benefits too.
1) Promotion!
Suggestions to improve your website and moral character notwithstanding, people like to read website reviews, and over six thousand people search for them each month. Putting your site up for review has the potential to reach six thousand new visitors. It's a valid way to increase traffic and sales or ad revenue. Remember that most publicity is good publicity, and if the critics are particularly scathing, they have saved you months of waiting around for traffic that wasn't going to come. Don't take it personally.
With that said, it pays to submit your site to multiple sites that do website reviews. Multiple submissions will allow you to verify if your site is particularly deficient in an area or if you just had one reviewer who decided to be particularly brutal on you for some reason. It's also good from the promotion angle because you get your site name on more than one website in the website review space.
2) You tested A and B, but the people wanted C
One the things you should do before starting your website is do something called A/B testing, where you test how well people click on your links with one website design as opposed to another. Does your Donate button belong at the bottom of your articles or in the sidebar? What about your "Add to Cart" button? Only one way to find out, right? Ask the people what they want.But maybe you've got it all wrong. Maybe the best place for your donate button is in a pop up when a user rolls their mouse off of your website and tries to leave. Maybe instead of selling your ebook with "Add to Cart" in the sidebar, you should give that ebook away as an incentive to sign up for your email newsletter - and then use that newsletter to promote your new online course. The flexibility of a site review allows for more qualitative and nuanced feedback than what preliminary tests can do, especially if you ran those tests inside your organization or with friends and family members.
If you had no idea what A/B testing was when you launched your site, this is all the more reason to get a review now. This will allow you to understand what parts of your site design you can improve, or which parts you can take to A/B testing as part of a redesign. This is covered under the First Impressions and Appearance sections of the Bizdustry review service.
3) Your content wasn't up when your site launched, but you can get feedback on it now.
The third benefit of getting your website reviewed is that you get your content reviewed as well. This includes your writing, which is very important for blog sites. How people improve their writing is fairly simple: they get feedback on their writing and they revise it until it communicates what they want to communicate to whom they want to communicate it to. This is the process of how writing is improved that is used in colleges and universities in America. We sit down and give our writing to our fellow students for criticism and feedback until our work communicates clearly with them and also, hopefully, with the professor who is giving us our writing grade.While blogging classes exist, they are expensive. Even if you can afford one, students in a blogging class may not be in your niche and interested in what you're selling. A website review is a far better choice. The reviewer sees your writing in the context of your actual site so they have a better idea of what you're trying to accomplish with your content, and can give you sounder advice on how to improve it. This is covered in the Grammar and Spelling section and the Originality section of the Bizdustry review service. The reviewer will evaluate your site and content and how different it is from other sites.
For forums, it's worth looking at what content you've attracted from your users, almost more than the content that you have created. How active is your forum? What are the staff and user groups? Do they serve your users and make sense with your site and what you are trying to accomplish? It pays to have a second pair of eyes to evaluate your results. You may be comfortable on your forum, but are your users and staff members? Is this forum attractive to the broader Internet as a place that people want to join? There was no way for you to know this or test for this before your site launched, but now it can be evaluated by a reviewer and improved. This is covered in the Member/Forum Activity section and Staff User groups sections of the Bizdustry review service.
4) Your website keeps evolving and communicating with its audience
As we continue in our voyage of life around the sun, we find that change is the only constant, and your website needs to adapt and change with the information it sells to people. That is because the people you are selling information to change, and also the information that you sell will change as well. However, to be in lockstep with change is a difficult task, and so sometimes we need to told about the changes we need to make as time goes on. It doesn't help that every time you change your website, there will be criticism and questions, because part of your audience hasn't changed to the new reality that you have realized. Each time you need to communicate something new to your visitors, your website changes.Fortunately, for most websites, change is a slow and gradual matter. But after a large and major change, it pays to get feedback on your website, to have it reviewed again and again. Think of this as simply the way to ensure that your message is getting through and that you are communicating with your audience properly, after their revulsion to change has passed and their emotions have calmed down. If you audience grows to a massive size it may be better to conduct an internal poll of your users, rather than burdening an external review service, but the principle remains the same. When guiding people, it pays to talk to them and turn a one-way conversation into a two-way one. Keep listening, keep talking, and you will not make the mistake of selecting and stubbornly holding onto a misleading and ineffective domain name, among many others.
UPDATE: As of 12/23/2023, the Bizdustry Review Service has been discontinued. However, if you want a review for your site, the Member Reviews and Brainstorming section remains open! While this forum provides a bit of a looser format for reviews, it's still a good place for webmasters to take advantage of for feedback on their sites. Thanks!
Last edited:
