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Get a review of your website. Launched today.
- user24 14y agoI got an error when I tried to submit our two-letter dot com domain, sans www or protocol.
- bilus 14y agoCould you post the name of the domain here?
- facorreia 14y agoVery nice idea and it's something I'd definitely want to use. Just one issue: it would be great if the service allowed me to accumulate credit by reviewing other sites, and have my site reviewed by many people when I launch it (using my credit).
- hucker 14y agoGood idea :) Perhaps submitter should be able to score feedback as helpful or not, so people can't spam asdf on every site to gain "credits"?
- facorreia 14y agoSure. Better to assume it's ok and have a "flag" option, though. On the contrary, it'll put too much of a burden on the submitter and if they fail to approve your comment it won't count.
- msteigerwalt 14y agoIt'd be more interesting to allow some sort of optional rating system which feeds into something like a gaming matchmaking system. People who consistently send out good reviews will get a rank of "A", for example, and be matched to others with similar rankings. That way, even low-quality posts ("i liek that u have a logo") can be accounted for, without treating them like spam. As the reviewer becomes better at reviewing, they will see an increase in their ranking and better reviews.
- bilus 14y agoNice one, thanks!
- yogo 14y agoSounds like a lot of the same problems the review forum on ozzu.com had/has. Look how that turned out. Usually when there is some motivation for reviewing other sites the quality of the reviews goes down.
- bilus 14y agoThis is precisely my concern.
- tstegart 14y agoHmm.. it doesn't seem to check if the website you're reviewing is actually there. The window just sits there, and if I go to the site it is down.
- bilus 14y agoThank you for the feedback!
- chintan 14y agoLoved the concept. And kudos for a frictionless onboarding process. Just submitted 3 reviews. Some suggestions: - I forgot to submit the "star" ratings. Just entered the comment. May be you can have 1. give rating, 2. provide specific feedback (I would not use the word "comment") - It would be nice to see the reviews I submitted and edit if needed - Also, I'm not clear if the reviews will be made public. make it clear upfront. - Not sure if you already do, I would like to see "Rating" of the reviewer. That would help to judge the feedback. Keep it up!
- JasonFruit 14y agoI did the same thing here — forgot to set a star rating.
- eps 14y agoTo each his own, so the star ratings are absolutely meaningless if you think about it.
- bilus 14y agoMany people like them. :)
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- benpink 14y ago+1 on star ratings since I just forgot to select one for a site and feel bad since I rather liked it. Failing that, how about defaulting the rating to 3 star so at least if you do forget you don't end up giving the lowest rating possible? Enjoying the whole process so far though, nice job.
- benpink 14y agoFor ref, the signup email landed in my gmail spam folder. For spam-like content according to the notice.
- mtrimpe 14y agoYou might want to make sure that you're first on queue if you sign up your site and do a bunch of reviews. I just did three reviews and it should've been possible to make sure I got one in return by now, but that didn't seem to happen yet (or is it because my site is HTTPS only?) I can second the comment about star ratings as well; the default of 1 star especially was not in line with my intent for at least one of my reviews.
- bilus 14y agoThank you so much for the feedback. Have you received your feedback yet?
- russgray 14y agoGreat idea, but the UI is a little confusing. After writing a comment do I need to click 'Add comment' AND 'Submit review'? Or does either do the job? Also I forgot to set a star rating, perhaps default to zero and prompt user if they don't set it? Why can't I see the reviews/comments I've submitted on my account page?
- bilus 14y agoThank you! Two first two issues will be fixed soon. The third has to wait till a bit later.
- smadam9 14y agoCool idea. Great job on launching - I'm sure there were many things you'd like to clear up and fix for a "proper" launch, but you finished something and you got people using it. As many people said already, it would be great to know the difference between "Add comment" and "Submit review". Seems like they could do the same thing. Keep polishing it, and then post a changelog somewhere - it's always nice to see the list of bugs people have worked through at the early stages of a site. It's also really motivating for the developer as well.
- bilus 14y agoThank you for the positive feedback. I really appreciate it. "Add comment" is on its way out. There will be no way to post more than 1 comment, as ppl. post 1.1 comment on the average so it's just unnecessarily complicating things. I'm keeping a backlog; good idea, posting it, thanks!
- karl_gluck 14y agoGreat idea! Unfortunately, it looks like you're already getting spammed. I just reviewed Google.com and what I think would have been nsfw site had I let it load. Also, it takes too long to generate the screenshot. I waited a few minutes before giving up on my third review. Why not just open the site in an iframe? Getting to try it out without having to log into anything is fantastic.
- wilfra 14y agoGenerating the screenshot was slow but didn't take anywhere near a few minutes for me. Maybe ~5 seconds. Site probably getting a lot of traffic, I got some errors at first but it works fine now. Cool site.
- karl_gluck 14y agoAh, I checked when it was first posted but it seems to be better now. It was probably the site itself and not the screenshot functionality that was the problem. As suggested in another reply, linking via iframe would still be a nice option to have when submitting.
- bilus 14y agoThanks for the follow-up. IFrame had actually been there in version 1 but people use really non-standard stuff to break out of frames and some are not even aware of it because they use third-party frameworks. Screenshot + link to open in a new window actually started as a sort of a workaround but I think this allows people to focus more on first impressions instead of going into usability testing.
- riffraff 14y agomany sites would not work in iframe (they are an increasing number, sadly), but I second this, as an option at submission time maybe?
- bilus 14y ago
- tobyjsullivan 14y agoSmart idea. I hope the feedback is ultimately constructive in practice.
- bilus 14y agoThank you.
- sweentrepreneur 14y agoI also love the idea. Seams to be some problems when I first click the button "Add comment" and then rated and submitted by clicking "Submit review".
- __alexs 14y agoSimilarly http://commandshift3.com/ http://commandshift3.com/ but you know, not entirely broken.
- aarondf 14y agoYour comment seems to have brought that site to its knees also: "There has been an error initializing CAP web tracking." So don't feel too bad OP.
- smadam9 14y agoHow is that similar? I didn't see any opportunity to compare websites on criticue.
- mnicole 14y agoA Hot or Not clone for screenshots that does nothing to give the designer/developer actual feedback and unfairly pits e-com sites against content-heavy sites and brochure sites?
- zupreme 14y agoI get the following when going to http://www.criticue.com/ http://www.criticue.com/ : Application Error An error occurred in the application and your page could not be served. Please try again in a few moments. If you are the application owner, check your logs for details.
- bilus 14y agoThis was a temporary problem. Thank you for reporting this!
- brendanib 14y agoGreat idea, getting close on execution. I've reviewed 5 sites so far though, and all of them are awful. Would be great to put together a list of 1000 great websites and let users review those, because it makes being a reviewer more fun.
- bilus 14y agoThank you, suggestion noted. :)
- psikatt 14y agoI remember something similar a couple years back called feedbackroulette
- john-n 14y agoWould be nice to be able to sign up and submit feedback without having to submit a site, there doesn't appear to be any way to do that at present?
- bilus 14y agoThanks, will be taken care of soon!
- ig1 14y agoDon't to 1-to-1, do n-for-1 as the dynamics work out much better with higher n. Look at how other people do it for other sectors (for example Critters for fiction writing and okcupid for photos)
- bilus 14y agoThank you for pointing that out! I may want to try it in the next release. It would require a clear point system though. I want to keep things as simple as possible for the time being.
- huhtenberg 14y agoOki-doki. It's a good start, but you need to take it a notch up to make it actually useful. Specifically, let say I am on a receiving end of reviews made by some random people. I don't really care what they have to say unless it's credible or representative. Let's look at latter, as it's an easier one. The way to ensure a review is representative, is to ask other people to look at the review and say if they agree with it or not. Once it gets 10-20-30 meta up/down votes, it'd be more or less possible to say if the review is meaningful or if it was a brain fart. Make the meta reviewing process mandatory. You want to get your site reviewed, pull a "meta" duty on a dozen of past reviews and (perhaps) write a review. When selecting a review for meta, do it randomly, but favor those with low vote count and controversial ones (over those voted way up or way down). This would be an MVP of your idea. Without this, it's nice, but it's generally useless. (edit) Oh, and perhaps simplify reviewer's life a bit and have 3 sections - "what's good", "what's bad", "free-form comments".
- willtheperson 14y ago"This would be an MVP of your idea. Without this, it's nice, but it's generally useless." But you've pointed out at least 5 new features. Let's say they add all of them and it fails.. Could they have learned that with only 4? 3? 1, new features? To me, the MVP of this idea is that someone can review a site and have their site reviewed. Everything else is just a feature. Not to say they wouldn't greatly enhance the product, but MVP literally means minimum viable product; not minimum awesome product.
- bilus 14y agoThanks, that was exactly the idea -- solicit feedback on something that works but hasn't too much 'chrome'. I received more than 200 really useful suggestions (and bug reports) and the tool will definitely evolve. It already is.
- bilus 14y agoThank you for all the useful suggestions, esp. about the 3 sections.
- crowdmatch2 14y agoAs a designer/front end developer I might have a few reviews for critcue.com...
- bebraw 14y agoGreat idea! I would love to review sites while waiting a review on mine. Please make this possible.
- mebymyself 14y agoThis was possible long time ago: feedbackroulette.com.
- azilnik 14y agoThe star rating seems almost unnecessary, compared to the rich feedback you get from the comments. I notice my time incrementing, but what does that mean to me? Overall, nicely done. LOVE the on-boarding process.
- bilus 14y agoThank you!
- jhuckestein 14y agoI just wrote a lengthy review about a site that I feel could be improved but after clicking Submit the button went into a loading state and nothing has happened since. The comment field was blanked out after I pressed "Add comment". Any way to get my review back in the JS console? Re the site itself, I think it's a good idea but I agree with the meta-scoring. Add a point system that levels you up both by writing a review and later by reviewing reviews of the same site/commenting on them. The higher your level or the more points you have, the more your sites will be reviewed. And please make https sites fail more elegantly. It's okay that you can't load them in an iframe, but make it look less broken. I submitted an https site and I doubt many people will review it when they are met with a huge screen saying "http only" through no fault of their own. Instead say "This site is using https (learn more), please click here to open the site in a new tab"
- arbuge 14y agoSimilar experience here. What's the difference between comments and reviews for that matter? There's an add comment button and an add review button, apparently tied to the same field. Also got some after-the-fact request to sign up before getting the review of my site I was promised... not too interested in that.
- keesj 14y agoA review can have multiple comments, and should have at least one. So the workflow is as follows: 1. Enter comment. Submit it. 2. Repeat step 1. 3. Submit review. Took me a few seconds as well to figure that out.
- nfm 14y agoYeah, the 'Add comment' link is pretty confusing. I'd consider moving the '1 comment' text below the comment box, and display the truncated comment text instead. It felt very much like the comment I'd entered had just disappeared with the current implementation.
- 14y ago
- bilus 14y agoOP: Hi guys, I'll do my best to reply to all comments posted here a bit later. As it is now we're barely handling the flood of reviews. :) It's a good thing and very exciting but we had to scale up the number of heroku instances the second time in a row. So please bear with all the errors for a while, we're working on some issues esp. screenshot generation as it is not coping with the load. Wow! We didn't expect an instant success like this. Thank you all for your contributions.
- evan_ 14y agoFYI- the signup email got stuck in my spam folder in gmail.
- bilus 14y agoYeah, it really sucks. Thanks for letting me know about this.
- astine 14y agoI love the idea behind this site and if I get some useful feedback on my website, I'll be ecstatic. Anyway, your site not really a success yet. You've just been Hacker Newsed. Traffic will probably go back down after today. It's happened to me before. Anyway, it looks like a major bottleneck you are experiencing is that you have to moderate every review that's written. I don't think that's going to be sustainable. I'd try having using rate reviews "helpful" or "not helpful" like they do for reviews on most online stores. And then maybe have an automatic filter for easily detectable things like foul language or gibberish. Good luck, I like you site.
- bilus 14y agoI absolutely agree, the traffic will definitely go down. I hope to retain some users but the idea was to get as much feedback as possible. Yes, moderating is a bottleneck. :) Thank you for the feedback! Greatly appreciated.
- hayksaakian 14y agoI didn't get an email confirming my account, on the sign up area after doing my first review, I tried both of my gmail addresses and have yet to see anything in either. Cool concept, add a meta aspect as others have said.
- CrankyPants 14y agoWhat about reversing the order? Make it so you can't submit your site for review until you've reviewed another. Obviously quality may suffer, as people will just type garbage for the sake of getting theirs submitted, but with volume that can be fixed via other means down the road. I'll also second the n-for-1 suggestion.
- bilus 14y agoWill think about it for the next release. Thank you so much.
- benwerd 14y agoJust requested and posted my first reviews. This is super-awesome, and I expect I'll be using it a lot. Thank you. Scrolling down, I did also forget to leave a star rating. Maybe that can be clearer?
- netfire 14y agoLike the concept. Just submitted 4 reviews and haven't got one back for my site after 15 mins. Any way of shortening the queue to provide a quicker reward for my critiques would be awesome. It'd also be nice to see your site's screenshot to know what people are looking at when they review my site.
- bilus 14y agoModerating is a bottleneck but it'll improve. There's currently a queue of sites but the idea is to make it as short as possible. Yeah, instant feedback would be really cool! :)
- user24 14y agoI need a terms and conditions link. I want to submit my company's website but I want an assurance that the feedback won't be visible by the general public; i.e. through a google search for "example.com review" or something. and Ts and Cs page or data policy would clear that up. As it stands, I'm reluctant to use this service.
- qnk 14y agoWhat prevents anyone from submitting your website on your behalf? Do they use some kind of "put this HTML file in your root folder" or something similar?
- evan_ 14y ago> What prevents anyone from submitting your website on your behalf? Nothing.
- user24 14y agoOh, nothing at all. I'm just saying that the reason I haven't submitted it is because there's no indication of what will happen when I do. I just don't want "example.com uses criticue" plastered on their twitter/facebook/etc, and there's nothing reassuring me that it's semi-private. I also wasn't specific enough; I'm talking about the website of the company that I work for, not one I own. So the reason I'm reticent about using the service is that I'm merely casually interested in what people have to say, rather than submitting the site in an official capacity.
- bilus 14y agoYou're absolutely right. TOS is badly needed as well as stressing the point of the site -- reviews are private. Thank you for pointing that out.
- nacs 14y agoIf you work for a company that requires secrecy, you should probably go with a professional evaluation anyway (via consultants and user testing). I think this site was meant for quick 1 or 2 sentence feedback from the general public for starter/personal sites and the feedback examples on the front page of their site clearly shows this.
- hjay 14y agoNot sure if this is the same site from like a week ago. I signed up for a free review and it never came.
- bilus 14y agoPls. tweet me or email (martinb _at_ criticue _dot_ com) with your URL and I'll be happy to look it up for you.
- mnicole 14y agoServices like this concern me because I don't know the credibility of the person on the other end, nor do I know if the effort I put into someone else's review is going to guarantee that I get an equally verbose one. In the same vein, the function of a site defines the design and someone telling me that my content portal "is way too busy" isn't going to help me when I wasn't going for some sort of minimalistic trend the reviewer may be more likely to rate higher. I'm not sure if you're changing things right now or A/B testing, but when I initially went to your link there were examples of what I could expect. Now there's no way of knowing what the process looks like and how these viewers see my site. Is it a screengrab of the homepage, do they get the link and surf around? Also, is there anything stopping someone from writing a bunch of useless one-liner reviews just to get their site seen?
- bilus 14y agoThank you for the feedback. I'm working hard to improve the service as much as possible. As far as spamming, reviews are moderated but one-liners are very often passed through, because they are useful. The idea is to get, say, 10-20 reviews of your site, very quickly. P.S. Yeah, it's A/B :)
- mnicole 14y agoI suppose as a designer I'm probably not your target market anyway, since I have other outlets to get critiques. One-liners would irritate me too much. :) Good luck!
- josephjrobison 14y agoGood concept because professional review sites charge an arm and a leg for just pointing out the obvious (for the most part). I was stoked to review my first site but the first thing I got was a shitty image porn blog. If you want it to be legitimate you gotta weed out the smut for people to take it seriously. Great idea though.
- bilus 14y agoThanks! Added a way to quickly flag site as spam and get another one. Please let me know what you think.
- joshmoskovitz 14y agocan't submit my email on the homepage. saying it's invalid although its just my gmail address. Anyone else?
- Fletch137 14y agoIt's asking for the address of your website, not your email address (mydomain.com rather than me@mail.com).
- josh2600 14y agoSomething is very broken here. I keep trying to put our website in (http://www.2600hz.com http://www.2600hz.com) but I'm getting completely different sites loaded. I believe there's some database error that's serving other people's sites and that's really not good :(.
- bilus 14y agoYou get _another_ website for review. Once you post your review of that site, your review -- 2600hz.com will get queued for review by another designer. If that explains it then I'm sorry -- I'll try to make it more intuitive in the next update.
- Kellster 14y agoUh oh. I added my website (http://www.pisoftware.com http://www.pisoftware.com in case you want to look it up) and did a review of another site. Signed up for email alerts, got no confirmation email, and I can't see the page for my site anymore. Something no bueno. That's my immediate critique of a website critique website called Criticue. It's like Inception.
- bilus 14y agoEmail probably in spam, esp. if you use Gmail. I counted 5 reviews for the site. Have they been useful? If not, feel free to email me (martinb __at criticue __dot com).
- stcredzero 14y agoIs there a Rotten Tomatoes of web app reviews?
- tobyjsullivan 14y agoAfter some use, I definitely see the direct and immediate value of getting feedback from an alternative perspective. I'm hearing people question the credibility of the reviews but I don't think that's the point. If someone tells me my header graphic is illegible or my site doesn't display in IE6... that's helpful as is. That said, this feels a bit like a Ponzi scheme in the sense that I'll only get reviews as long as there are new/active users... I could see that being a long-term issue (as with any site following this model).
- tjosten 14y agoI do always get a "Invalid website address." error when entering my URL - what to do?
- nostromo 14y agoLove the idea! However it doesn't seem to be working currently. I click "get review" and I'm prompted to review someone's website first -- which I already did several times over.
- hissworks 14y agohaving the opposite issue - submitted for review just fine, but it won't pull anything up for me to review. running chrome on winxp.
- bilus 14y agoThanks for the heads up! Did you get any error messages? There were some temporary problems because the site got overloaded, I boosted the number of heroku instances so the problem should no longer be there.
- bilus 14y agoThe current length of the waiting queue is about 2-3 hours. Please feel free to contact me at martinb at criticue dot com if there are still no reviews after some time.
- wilfra 14y agoI got a free one. Submitted two reviews and have gotten three back so far :) Idea: take a page from the Yelp/Quora/HN/StackExchange playbook and gamify it by letting people build up some kind of reputation points/karma/credits or whatever. You'd be amazed how much time some people will invest in your site just for some pixels on their profile.
- dreamdu5t 14y agoGreat job on the UI and UX! I think it would be more valuable if the reviewers are from the target customer/market, not just random people on the Internet. That would be a review service worth paying for!
- bilus 14y agoAgreed. No idea how to entice them to review sites though.
- twog 14y agoIm getting an error when trying to use my .co domain. Heres a screenshot http://cl.ly/image/3Y0r2w2Q0j3t http://cl.ly/image/3Y0r2w2Q0j3t
- bilus 14y agoThank you for the bug report. Using a url shortening service as a workaround? Sorry about this.
- lominming 14y agoOverall a good idea. Screenshots sometimes takes quite long to load. Would be great to integrate Notable or allow annotation on the screenshot. Add Comment vs Submit Review is confusing. After adding comment, it just disappeared. You have no idea what happened.
- bilus 14y agoThanks, will fix it! Thanks for the suggestions too.
- Roelven 14y agoI like the idea but I fear for the lack of quality. Whenever you have "outsourced" n-to-1 projects to platforms like Mechanical Turk you know you need something to guard the quality of the input that people are entering. It's good to get positive feedback on your work, but what do the comments mean otherwise? "Very clean, I like it" - clean in what sense? Design-wise? Or is the HTML markup nice & tidy? "Nice big calls to action" - Nice & big, but is bigger better? Do they work? Etc. I am keeping my eye on this one, could definitely evolve in something (even more) valuable. Keep it up!
- bilus 14y agoThank you for your support despite the site's shortcomings.
- hmexx 14y agoI like it! Can you make a version for startup ideas, instead of websites? Keep everything else exactly the same. Then add leaderboards, scores, etc. So many discussions here about startups, I feel like we have enough aggregate brainpower to create a great peer-reviewed top 50 ideas list. Then all we need to do is create teams and crack on!
- bilus 14y agoThank you for the suggestion.
- hmexx 14y agoSeems it defaults to 1 star if you don't remember to rate a website? If so, that will drag down the ratings. I already forgot to rate a couple. Nice work!
- bilus 14y agoYes, it'll be fixed today or tomorrow. Thank you!
- boyter 14y agoOnly Issue I have is that all the feedback I get is "can't click on any links". I know that its a screenshot (hence you cannot) but you might want to add that its a screenshot other then the loading message somewhere. I suspect a quick check of your feedback logs will show a lot of people with the same comment.
- bilus 14y agoThanks you!
- aw3c2 14y ago> WARNING: This is a temporary account! what does that mean? how/when/why will I lose access to that account? I really want to see my site reviewed but I do not actually want a "proper" account.
- bilus 14y agoGood point. It stores the info in cookies so once you clear them, your access is gone. But you should be able to refresh the browser etc. I guess it should be pointed out (a "what does it mean" link). What do you think?
- gburt 14y agohttp://cl.ly/image/3q130N1x303H http://cl.ly/image/3q130N1x303H I don't think this is how it is supposed to look. Chrome under Mac OS.
- bilus 14y agoDoes it still show up like this? I'm actually using a Mac to write this on with Chrome + Safari. There was a problem with too much traffic (fixed now by scaling the site up), I suppose CSS might not have loaded. Do you think this could be the case? Thank you.
- ahardin 14y agoWell done. Good concept. I look forward to seeing you make some of the enhancement that others have suggested. The meta-reviews is a great idea. Also, signup email went to Gmail spam for me. Additionally, a feature of perhaps marginal utility would be to see all the sites that I've reviewed (e.g. I want to take another look at a cool looking site that I remember reviewing but can't remember what it was).
- bilus 14y agoThank you for the suggestion and for the heads up about spam. The latter is a royal pain.
- nosecreek 14y agoI agree with all the others who say this is a neat idea. I've reviewed several sites, but there doesn't seem to be any confirmation of this on my dashboard. There is a button to "Get review" but in reality I should already be inline for a few, right? The dashboard should say so somewhere.
- bilus 14y agoGood point!
- fookyong 14y agosilky smooth onboarding process - loved it!
- bilus 14y agoThanks!
- dizzystar 14y agoThe button says "Go to [website]" but points to the same page. I think this has a lot of potential, but it should be easier to offer better UI controls and testing. For example, I may want users to sign into a dummmy account or see specific pages. The home page of a website is rarely good enough to get meaningful impressions.
- bilus 14y agoI agree, thanks. The only issue is that there are other sites that do it pretty well. Usability testing is tricky in general.
- markcbain 14y agoThe concept is flawed. Getting random feedback from random people is not at all useful. Feedback needs to take into account the target users and the goals of the design. The designer needs to ask specific questions, not just "what do you think?". Maybe this product would be useful if users could put out a call for people who meet certain criteria (i.e. music-lovers, 25-40), and then focus their attention on a small set of questions. In this way, there's a possibility of getting something useful to go on.
- bilus 14y agoThank you for your random feedback. ;)
- blaze33 14y agoYour mails got in my (gmail) spam folder...
- bilus 14y agoThank you for the warning!
- stinky613 14y agoI like where you're headed with this. I'd really like it if you provided an interface for marking and critiquing specific parts of a web page. For instance: let me draw boxes and drop pins and write comments specifically on those areas. In short, having a single comment as you would a typical Amazon product review provides less depth than I'd like to see from peer reviews in this domain.
- bilus 14y agoYou're absolutely right about this and I too think this would be really cool to have it. Thanks!