Yahoo! Local... Not Quite the Most Interesting Site on the Web

Yahoo! Local allows its users to do a few things, though nothing too exciting. There are four main tabs to drive participation on the site:

1. City Guide
Users can write their own reviews of their favorite, or not so favorite businesses. These reviews will be tracked under the My Local tab so that you can keep track of the businesses you have rated (1-5 star rating system and comment), and quickly view the thread to see what other people are saying... if anyone else is saying anything. *There tends to be 1-3 reviews for most featured businesses from my town = sad.

The City Guide tab is organized well with a list of business categories as well as featured Popular Music, Arts, Sports, Events, Maps (?), and a buzz list containing the most searched words of the week. I find it humorous that these are the three most searched words for my town, and am now extremely interested in White Lake's Yahoo! Local demographics :



2. My Local
My Local is supposed to be the hub for all of your Yahoo! Local activities. Under this tab you can see recent searches, your reviews, your collections (there is no description for what a collection is, but I believe you can title a collection for example, places to go on a Tuesday; places to go on a Friday; places to take the kids this summer... and add businesses to those collections). Seems like a lot of work to me, but for those looking to live active economy-driving lifestyles it could come in handy.



3. Directory
Because I have been using Google for so long, coming to Yahoo! Local to find a business seems very unnecessary. Sorry Yahoo!(!)



4. White Lake Neighbors
This may be the most interesting thing on Yahoo! Local. Get this, you can post a discussion topic, e.g. "I'm looking at buying a home that uses heating oil," “Are You Tired of Your Money Blowing in Wind? FREE CLEANING if you call within 5 days!,"“Where is the best trail in the area for bike riding?" “Does anyone know of any charities that could use beanie babies,” "Let's get schoolkids involved in politics!"



... and people can reply to the topics. The problem is that not many people reply to these topics, and many of the topics have something to do with cleaning, handyman services, or are complete wild-card questions for specific towns that aren't too local enough for me to know such specific information on-- The more you "zoom" out the radius of the search for discussion topics, the more discussions that come up.



OVERALL REVIEW
Could be better for people living in bigger cities... where more reviews might get written... but I think that is what Yelp is for.

Yahoo! Local (NOT a dating site like it sounds)

First Impression
I think I have heard about Yahoo! Local sometime in the past few years, but it wasn't until this week that I took a look at the site. While I am a big fan of Yelp, this site seems to have potential for customer reviews, and even neighbor-neighbor interaction.

Customer-Based Reviews
I know Yahoo! has a space for expert reviews, but I don't think that Yahoo! Local includes any. Currently I am signed into my old Yahoo! account so it automatically made my hometown the "local" city to feature. Right after landing on the site I noticed the White Lake Neighbors tab. It sort of reminds me of a less-spam version of Facebook's Marketplace. While it is underdeveloped, and not too many listings (discussion topics) have had replies, I definitely see some potential for this section of Yahoo! Local due to the neighborly voices of the few people who have responded to questions (and who've written the reviews under the City Guide tab).



Credibility
No matter which review site, whether it be Ratemyprofessor, or Yelp (the two review sites I use most often), when it comes to credibility, I am always a little weary.

One of the first businesses I clicked on had these two reviews:

My first instinct was that because the top review said awful food and gave the business one star, and the second review said great food and gave five stars... I don't trust the second review. Jennifer H could easily be someone from the business. Then I noticed the dates were two years apart, the bad review was more recent.

As I continue to read through more reviews ratings become more consistent per business and I notice that the reviews are fairly detailed. The more details I see, the more legitimate the review sounds. I have come to react to reviews much more negatively when they sound anything close to gimmicky or whiney. Gimmicky when an overachiever, under-experienced marketer tries to do damage control or reputation building; whiney when it's a no marketing experience business owner being defensive online (telling the customer he/she is wrong... as if it is okay because they are not face-to-face.)



With the rise of social media use for business purposes, marketers are told to avoid commenting on blogs to promote their sites, make Facebook pages that simply announce sales; anything that is not true human-human interaction is looked down upon and has a really low success rate.

Another thing that stuck out to me on this site, that I have noticed on the other review sites... which is sad, is that if I see a well written review (good sentence construction, flawless spelling, etc.), I tend to think it is a company trying to save their reputation. For example:



Final Thoughts/Review
I don't usually trust any reviews unless there are 4+ majority "vote" for one side or the other, and with the vote, there needs to be consistent positive or negative details within those reviews. Until Yahoo! Local gets more users participating on this site from my town, I don't think I will check back to often; maybe annually just to see what crazy posts get placed under the White Lake Neighbors tab.

SNS Bebo Part 2

In part 2 of my Bebo review, I would like to break down the aspects of the site that are the most important to me.

Home Page
When I get to the homepage I am surprisingly disappointed. Nothing fancy, nothing fancy at all. It is recommended to me that I view Lady Gaga's Poker Face video, as well as (buy?) the HSM3 DVD... did they not realize I said I was born in 1985? Do they really think I would be interested in High School Musical? Maybe they are trying to make me cooler than my ancient age of 25.



Like most SNS's I have used, I am able to easily add video, photos, and applications to my profile. It looks like many users use the Timeline space to rant and rave about the things they love most in life...



Layout
The design aspects of the layout is the bland To Do and Lifestream sections. There is an option to customize your profile background and sadly people have taken advantage of this... and their profiles look overwhelmingly cluttered. There doesn't seem to be a great sense of calm across the profile base on this SNS... and there is a huge overuse of the smiley face. EEK!



Oh here we go, I'm also allowed to "Tell my friends what I'm up to! How about now?," and "Go to my stuff." I'm about to go on a hunt to see what their target audience is for the site... no luck.

Culture
After finding their Testimonials page, it looks like they have a group of Bebo addicts to advocate for them. Some people make the comment that Facebook is too slow in their country, or they have never tried Myspace. I cannot imagine having never tried either before coming across, and becoming addicted to Bebo. Going off of the pictures I see on this page, I think they have a younger, high school, aged audience that spans several other countries. I also have made this assumption because some of the most popular bands (noted on my Bebo Profile) are Fall Out Boy, Miley Cyrus, and Rihanna.



Looking through various user profiles... it seems like another random group of people that want to be heard by whoever will listen.


That are okay with "flirting" with people or are scared of cyber stalking/bullying so they have set their profiles as private.


Overall Thought: Not impressed. It is a bad version of what Myspace used to be before the spammers took over back in 2007.

Postive Note: They seem to have a loyal following that embrace the chaos and make this and this happen.

SNS Bebo Part 1

First Impression
My first impression when clicking around Bebo a few days ago was that it is a less organized version of Myspace.

The Bebo Mission
The mission of the site is to "help you discover what's going on with YOUR world, and help the world discover what is going on with you. This language is very informal. Are the creators trying to be cool? Trying to be the site that knows what its audience can relate to and stoops to their level. I find this to be very, what is the word, forced. A forced fun, laid back, friendly relationship between the site's creators and their users.

About
On the about page it is explained that their latest features are a Social Inbox (Organize all email accounts into one inbox? Not really clear how this works.),a Lifestream Platform (Lifestream... as in Facebook's Live Feed but connecting all of your social media accounts?), and a Timeline (your personal newsfeed... you do something on Bebo, your actions are added to this feed). They (the Bebo team) also includes an address for Bebo so that users can send their ideas or "talk to one of our amazing team members." Oh come on, seriously? I realize this is the right thing to do, you know the start of a good B2C experience, but it is cheesy and annoying. I'm not actually sure I am over how awful the name Bebo sounds, so that may be creating a bias and overall negative tone for this review.

Getting Started
So I made an alias so that I can explore this site a little further. Hello Myra Jackson. One of the first screens I was sent to is my Edit Profile Screen. Apparently Facebook does everything right because the information page is a gray version of what I have used to seeing since a few Facebook updates ago... only with a gray color palette.

Custom Background Image Makes the Blog.

I chose my current PB template, "Ethereal," because it had a simple format that looked organized for the things I needed to include on the blog: About widget, Follow widget, regular blog posts with defined titles, dates, a text header, Blog Archive, and a Links widget.

I was also interested in having a colorful background, but did not want it to be too busy, so the salmon colored gradient worked out great.



Alternate Theme 1: Travel

This theme has an obvious charm to it with the armchair, and quaint picture frames in the background. The problem I see with this frame is that there is no need for that specific picture. The great thing I just discovered is that you can change the image! This just turned into a great theme. If you can create a nice background image for it, this would be the best theme to go with in my opinion. There is a shaded spot so that your blog posts will show up, there are several layout options, and you can edit the CSS! You could pretty much customize this site to be whatever you would like.

The problem I see with this blog is getting the background image good enough so that you can easily read your posts. The shading will obviously help a little, but depending on how big a screen people are reading your blog from, your background may not work as well as you think it will.



Alternate Theme 2:

While this theme has a lively background image to start (which some people may find tacky, others artistic) the theme also has the option to upload your own image. I think this theme would be a nice fashion student blog as it is colorful and may inspire some kind of artistic thought, but I don't think if you want to become a big fashion blogger that this is custom enough to do so. Also, I noticed that on one of the layouts, the right column's widgets separate into two columns. This looks cluttered and does not follow suit with the typical fashion blogs.



When it comes to templates, especially when working on my website, I find that the ones that do not allow a lot of widget integration, or allow CSS editing give you the greatest troubles. As I am not too good writing my own HTML or designing CSS templates myself, I have spend a lot of time trying to find a template that works best for my website needs. The problem is that a few little things are off that make the templates nightmare-esque. For example the image below shows a huge feature box that I wish was smaller because it takes up a good portion of the homepage (why the designers made this so large, I have no idea... otherwise I really like the template).

5 Tips From Shelby Jacobs About Blogging.

Here are my five blogging tips:

(1) If you are writing for your friends, write for your friends; write as you would normally talk to your friends.

+ If you are writing a blog for your family, make it family appropriate; add images they can share with other family members (you will inc. your loyal followers)

+ If you are writing a blog about your experiences with the stock market, write for people interested in finance (pick an age group… you might want to write for potential future employers, or you might want to write for your finance class buddies (but make it so only they can read your thoughts, not the public).

(2) Post regularly.

+ I have trouble doing this, I’m not going to lie. I know I will write each week, that is not really the problem. The problem is writing every M,W,F at 3 PM… a schedule my NIF audience could easily get used to due to he general high school/college class schedules.


*Image from the Art of the Business

(3) If you don’t have images, and can’t draw, and don’t want to borrow someone else’s images, borrow them anyway and learn to use the Microsoft word draw tool.

+ I was taught in a 7th grade desktop publishing class how to use MSW draw tools to create a pepsi can, house plans, and a thanksgiving dinner. You can do anything with these tools if you have a little time to get to learn the program. If you have no imagination of how things can go together, find a picture online and use the objects in the picture as something to trace (I don’t know about you, but I usually trace and then end up making something that looks completely different once more creative ideas start coming to mind.)



(4) If you are going to do a video blog…

+ Make sure it is worth sitting 2 minutes to watch… and make sure the image that is displayed before you press play is somewhat interesting (I never click any pictures that don’t look interesting unless I already know what I’m about to watch).

(5) Try out tumblr, wordpress, and blogger. They all have interesting themes and structures that vary in different ways. I have started blogs since high school and have used the three for various reasons.

Tumblr- currently using it to co-blog with my best friend whiel she is gone for the summer. We use it to share everything and anything; stories, website links, videos, pictures, whatever. Tumblr is cool because you simply click Text, Video, Link, etc. buttons and add a new post really quickly.



Blogger- in the past, I have used Blogger to keep a more personal journal for family and friend to read because it is not as easy to upload pictures as the other sites.



Wordpress- I currently use wordpress to host my website, NextInFashion.com. The templates offer a wide range of website building options, and can make a blog look more like a professionally done website, and less like your typical blog.

FSO: Fashion Students Online.com Design Review

I will evaluate this site based off of the elements listed in this article because I feel very biased about reviewing the site as it is quite similar to what I am doing with my own website.

Is the layout confusing?
The layout is a pretty standard three column design. The menu is easy to figure out and organized well with how many options are available. The home page seems to have a blog layout, though there is a menu navigation that you can click to "view as blog." I guess that is kind of confusing. Unless you haven't visited many websites, you should be familiar with how to easily get around this site.

Do you glide around the page naturally? Is the page balanced?
The page does seem to be fairly balanced, though it is very text heavy. The only images are in the header and in the right column; they are very unattractive, scam-like looking advertisements.

Does the color theme add to the site design?
The color theme of green, purple, and orange is not attractive to me at all. There is also some red text in the right column further throwing off the design appeal. In addition, the fashion students online logo (which I assume is the logo because it is in the header), is very plain (Microsoft Word font?) and colorless.

Are there any small details that add to the overall design?
There are not any details that add to the design. There aren't any custom looking elements, not even an attractive twitter button. Just this ugly little thing:


Are important elements, such as post headlines, clearly emphasized?
The post headings are clearly emphasized by an orange font. This looks a little ugly as it is placed on a website with purple as a main color. Hello Halloween?

Does the design make give the site a unique edge?
No, the site does not look very unique at all. There is a page that mentions that they are working on rebuilding the site. I feel like if they brought in a graphic designer to make a few custom images that match the look of the header, they would be well on their way to unifying and streamlining the look of the site. For example, look at these header and sidebar linked images from What I Wore:



Does the site allow commenting?
Yes, the site allows commenting, but it looks like there are only a few posts with 1-2 comments. Otherwise, it looks like it's normal for articles to have 0 comments.

Evaluation
I am as excited to see their site rebuild as I am to rebuild my own site with a layout that I am happy with. I think their site is nicely organized but could definitely use an upgrade on the custom design elements of the site; take it from a year 2000 site to 2010 site.