4 ms·

Inspired by HN: back with my 2 month project

About 6 months back I posted how I had created a MVP which had made me my first dollar on the internet http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2331556 I received tremendous encouragement and feedback from many HN members and it hit the home page. I had a few clients at that time for a really basic service but a couple of months back I decided to turn into a better featured product and made http://www.nostonepr.com/ I would love your honest feedback about it. Edit: The service helps you track up to 25 different search engines and other hotspots including Google news, blog search, Twitter, Facebook, Yahoo, Youtube, Flickr every day for your keywords.

pwman 15y ago
1) Ensure your 'ebay' query doesn't automatically correct the spelling, likely a general problem -- For LastPass I have hundreds of results like: Disney Trading Pin - FASTPASS PIN SET OF 5 -- perhaps throw out results without the keyword in the result set returned. 2) My ranked sources are weird -- google.pl is one of the top sources. 3) My topic cloud has URLs in it which looks... bad. 4) LastPass must be broken up into Last Pass in places as Ben Rothelsberger is prominent in LastPass' topic cloud. Good luck!
- combiclickwise 15y ago
  lots of good points and very useful. Thanks a lot. will work on these
dgunn 15y ago
In the footer you should consider not having so much capitalized text. It's hard to read and resulted in me not even attempting to read it. I would continue to use it as the column headers in your footer because caps works well in short bursts for emphasis.
- combiclickwise 15y ago
  understood. Will correct it. Thanks a lot.
iambot 15y ago
clickable: http://www.nostonepr.com/ http://www.nostonepr.com/
- combiclickwise 15y ago
  thanks
j_col 15y ago
Firstly, my compliments on your lovely design. I'm signing up for the free trail now because I can see how this could be very useful for me...
- combiclickwise 15y ago
  Thanks.. I would love your feedback once you have used it. Me email is on the dashboard.
_ud4a 15y ago
i will be signing up to check it out as well. like the simple design but i agree with removing the capital text in the footer. also i just realized you are not protecting your site against SQL injection in the registration page!! that should be the first thing you do :)
- _ud4a 15y ago
  also when logging in if i leave the username or password field empty i get a 404 error. so you'll need to fix up the error handling on the register and login page.
  - combiclickwise 15y ago
    Thanks. just fixed it.
- combiclickwise 15y ago
  Wow... I had completely forgotten that. Thanks a ton for pointing it out. Its fixed now phew!!
abbasmehdi 15y ago
You never mention why it does whatever it does. Among other things, I do PR for my current employer, but it failed to excite me because of the missing "whys". Nothing in the dashboard's images is clickable, leaving me with more questions than answers. The results aren't accurate, its not showing coverage for when it should. Lots of bugs in IE (enterprise setting is mostly MS tools). The results tab is showing when you found the article, not when it was published, why do I care about when you found it? And where is the number I care about that tells me when it came out? No media source guide: does not tell me anything about the influence of any story based on its circulation or prestige etc. The page loads too slow, latency issues too obvious.
- combiclickwise 15y ago
  Wow... very useful points. Thank you for posting. I will work on the whys. I wonder what the bugs are in IE? is the layout disturbed? or are any of the modules not loading? Can you tell me your IE version please? I am adding influence based on circulation in the next release. I will work on including more info on the home page. may be a video. The page load time issue... is it the dashboard or the "add keyword" functionality? Thanks again.
  - abbasmehdi 15y ago
    Video would be unnecessary. Keep it simple. Treat this as enterprise software. I have IE9, there were all sorts of bugs. Test on a Windows machine running various versions of IE. Load time = dashboard. Plus the list seems endless. So to me, who is tasked with figuering this out, it looks like an endless job.
    - combiclickwise 15y ago
      I am installing IE9 right now. I didn't understand what you mean by "Plus the list seems endless" though. What list did you mean? could you please explain. Thanks.
  - abbasmehdi 15y ago
    This is not PR, it is Media Monitoring. Call yourself that. PR means outreach. Just got your first email based on Keywords I set, here is some feedback: Let me set time I get the email. Also let me set how often I get the email: daily, weekly, monthly, hourly, real-time. Export to Excel so I can sort through the results. Highlight where my keywords appear, and show those two lines, not the first two lines of the article in which my keywords appear. (Allows me to get to the meat right away) Include date the article was published. (I know I’ve said this before) Allow web interface of the email so I can sort it online by publication name, date appeared, publisher influence level etc. Let me publish a report and/or export to Word based on my settings. Eg. I might want to see reports in this format in MS Word for some or all of the results (allow me to choose which ones): Publication name (Bold, Font 15, Arial) Article Title (Italics, Font 15, Arial) Date Published (Normal, Font 12, Arial) URL (Normal, Font 12, Arial) [Bullet] Each sentence where keyword appears. Now I can start showing this report to my clients, and execs, and man do I start looking like I'm top of my game. Also, if some pictures/analytics can be generated and exported to docs as well then that'd be great!
notJim 15y ago
The fading images are the most attention-grabbing thing on the homepage. I think they should be actual screenshots of the product in action, or something more compelling than whatever they are at least. Right now, I see some random graphs with generic world news, a bunch of social networking services, and then one thing that probably is your product, but it's kind of all randomly laid out and doesn't tell me a whole lot. Maybe instead, you could put in nice big text a problem the product solves and then alongside that, a screenshot of the product solving that problem. The tag line doesn't really clarify anything other than the source of the name, which still doesn't tell me much about your product. Beyond that, I'm not really your target market, so I can't do anything but wish you the best of luck!
- combiclickwise 15y ago
  I see what you mean. explaining the problem the product solves is a good idea. Thanks

pwman 15y ago

1) Ensure your 'ebay' query doesn't automatically correct the spelling, likely a general problem -- For LastPass I have hundreds of results like: Disney Trading Pin - FASTPASS PIN SET OF 5 -- perhaps throw out results without the keyword in the result set returned. 2) My ranked sources are weird -- google.pl is one of the top sources. 3) My topic cloud has URLs in it which looks... bad. 4) LastPass must be broken up into Last Pass in places as Ben Rothelsberger is prominent in LastPass' topic cloud. Good luck!

combiclickwise 15y ago
lots of good points and very useful. Thanks a lot. will work on these

dgunn 15y ago

In the footer you should consider not having so much capitalized text. It's hard to read and resulted in me not even attempting to read it. I would continue to use it as the column headers in your footer because caps works well in short bursts for emphasis.

combiclickwise 15y ago
understood. Will correct it. Thanks a lot.

iambot 15y ago

clickable: http://www.nostonepr.com/ http://www.nostonepr.com/

combiclickwise 15y ago
thanks

j_col 15y ago

Firstly, my compliments on your lovely design. I'm signing up for the free trail now because I can see how this could be very useful for me...

combiclickwise 15y ago
Thanks.. I would love your feedback once you have used it. Me email is on the dashboard.

_ud4a 15y ago

i will be signing up to check it out as well. like the simple design but i agree with removing the capital text in the footer. also i just realized you are not protecting your site against SQL injection in the registration page!! that should be the first thing you do :)

_ud4a 15y ago
also when logging in if i leave the username or password field empty i get a 404 error. so you'll need to fix up the error handling on the register and login page.
- combiclickwise 15y ago
  Thanks. just fixed it.
combiclickwise 15y ago
Wow... I had completely forgotten that. Thanks a ton for pointing it out. Its fixed now phew!!

abbasmehdi 15y ago

You never mention why it does whatever it does. Among other things, I do PR for my current employer, but it failed to excite me because of the missing "whys". Nothing in the dashboard's images is clickable, leaving me with more questions than answers. The results aren't accurate, its not showing coverage for when it should. Lots of bugs in IE (enterprise setting is mostly MS tools). The results tab is showing when you found the article, not when it was published, why do I care about when you found it? And where is the number I care about that tells me when it came out? No media source guide: does not tell me anything about the influence of any story based on its circulation or prestige etc. The page loads too slow, latency issues too obvious.

combiclickwise 15y ago
Wow... very useful points. Thank you for posting. I will work on the whys. I wonder what the bugs are in IE? is the layout disturbed? or are any of the modules not loading? Can you tell me your IE version please? I am adding influence based on circulation in the next release. I will work on including more info on the home page. may be a video. The page load time issue... is it the dashboard or the "add keyword" functionality? Thanks again.
- abbasmehdi 15y ago
  Video would be unnecessary. Keep it simple. Treat this as enterprise software. I have IE9, there were all sorts of bugs. Test on a Windows machine running various versions of IE. Load time = dashboard. Plus the list seems endless. So to me, who is tasked with figuering this out, it looks like an endless job.
  - combiclickwise 15y ago
    I am installing IE9 right now. I didn't understand what you mean by "Plus the list seems endless" though. What list did you mean? could you please explain. Thanks.
- abbasmehdi 15y ago
  This is not PR, it is Media Monitoring. Call yourself that. PR means outreach. Just got your first email based on Keywords I set, here is some feedback: Let me set time I get the email. Also let me set how often I get the email: daily, weekly, monthly, hourly, real-time. Export to Excel so I can sort through the results. Highlight where my keywords appear, and show those two lines, not the first two lines of the article in which my keywords appear. (Allows me to get to the meat right away) Include date the article was published. (I know I’ve said this before) Allow web interface of the email so I can sort it online by publication name, date appeared, publisher influence level etc. Let me publish a report and/or export to Word based on my settings. Eg. I might want to see reports in this format in MS Word for some or all of the results (allow me to choose which ones): Publication name (Bold, Font 15, Arial) Article Title (Italics, Font 15, Arial) Date Published (Normal, Font 12, Arial) URL (Normal, Font 12, Arial) [Bullet] Each sentence where keyword appears. Now I can start showing this report to my clients, and execs, and man do I start looking like I'm top of my game. Also, if some pictures/analytics can be generated and exported to docs as well then that'd be great!

notJim 15y ago

The fading images are the most attention-grabbing thing on the homepage. I think they should be actual screenshots of the product in action, or something more compelling than whatever they are at least. Right now, I see some random graphs with generic world news, a bunch of social networking services, and then one thing that probably is your product, but it's kind of all randomly laid out and doesn't tell me a whole lot. Maybe instead, you could put in nice big text a problem the product solves and then alongside that, a screenshot of the product solving that problem. The tag line doesn't really clarify anything other than the source of the name, which still doesn't tell me much about your product. Beyond that, I'm not really your target market, so I can't do anything but wish you the best of luck!

combiclickwise 15y ago
I see what you mean. explaining the problem the product solves is a good idea. Thanks