More Good Press!

Hello!

My apologies for not updating the blog for a while. Things have been very hectic around here. Our humble review site has received another great boost from an unsolicited article by Askmen.com Thanks to those guys for writing about us!

In pricing news, we have decided to keep the $4 pricing promo in place throughout the summer rather than going right back to the $8 rate. The cutoff date for this special will be August 31st 2006.

People seem to be voting a lot, but not doing as many reviews lately. The reviews are the heart and soul of the site, so please post a couple lines of advice when you check out a site! It only takes a second, even with the dreaded image verification in place!

Thanks to everyone for their continued support,

-Jake

Spam!

Greetings

Well, our listing on the Cool Site of the Day brought us plenty of visitors as expected. It also brought us some unwelcome spammers. We began receiving a flood of automated comment spam to everyone’s listings. Since there is a system in place to email you when a new comment has been posted about your site, many of your received notifications that you had a new comment. We had deleted these spammed comments so, it appeared that you were receiving false notifications. We apologize for this. To combat this spam we had to implement the visual confirmations on all comments. I know some people don’t care for these, but unfortunately we are forced to use this step to block the spamming. I hope it’s not too much of an inconvenience to everyone. Thanks for your patience in this matter, and rest assured, we would never be the ones spamming your email!

Best Regards,

-Jake

Going to be the Cool Site of the Day!

Hello again!

Doesmysitesuck.com is getting noticed again. We have just been informed that we are going to be the Cool Site of the Day on June 1st!! Thanks to the Cool Site for picking us, we really appreciate it.  To all of our new visitors: welcome!

Best Regards,

-Jake

Good news and bad news

Hello!

Thanks to everyone’s support, the site continues to expand and is getting quite popular. Unfortunately, with popularity come increased expenses. We have outgrown our old webhost and had to upgrade to a more robust (read more expensive) setup. In order to offset some of these expenses, we have had to switch to a paid submission model. The good news is that it’s very cheap. Only $4 for a permanent PR5 backlink with picture and weeks of homepage visibility is still a great bargain. Plus the always valuable comments about your site. I hope we continue to grow and provide a valuable place for webmasters to post your sites. If you have any comments or criticisms about this I would love to hear them.

Best Regards,

-Jake

Sorry, not for sale!

Hello!

We are quickly closing in on the 300 sites reviewed/posted mark. I have started to become a little bit more selective about the sites that are posted, mainly because of some spammers trying to take advantage of the system. Feedback has been great and I have even had 3 offers to sell the site, which I appreciate, but it’s not for sale. This baby is coded by hand and too much work has gone into it to sell after only a few months. We have big plans for this site. I want it to be the first thing a webmaster thinks of when launching a new site. “Better post it on doesmysitesuck.com to get some reviews first”, is what I hope people start thinking. Thanks for the support and keep those contributions coming.

Best Regards,

-Jake

200+ sites and PR predictions

Hello again,

We are steadily gaining a nice following here at Doesmysitesuck.com.  Thanks to all who submitted postive comments about the site and the concept.  We passed over 200 submissions this morning!  We still need more comments on sites, so if you submit one please don’t forget to review a couple before you leave.  Some good news: various Page Rank prediction tools are showing this site should be a PR 5,  on the next update.  So your backlinks from here should be pretty vaulable!   Also we now have an Alexa rank of 179,786! Not too shabby. 

Take care,

-Jake

Stick a fork in it - Beta is over!

Well, I’m calling the Beta period officially over.  There have been some more minor improvements to the look and feel of the site.  More information about each site is now presented.  People still aren’t leaving as many comments as we had hoped.  If you do submit your site,  please take 2 minutes to comment on some other’s sites.  It’s really the way this will become a helpful tool for everyone to get feedback.  Some quick stats on the beta period:

135 sites submitted

122 members

241 comments posted

Thanks for everyone who participated during the beta test!  Now let’s really get this thing rollling!

-Jake   

100 sites reviewed!

We just hit our 100th website posted (actually 101) this morning!  Not bad considering no real promotion has been done yet.  Everyone getting your sites in early should be happy because you will always be right at the top of your selected category as our site gets more popular.  We are beginning heavy promotion soon which should increase traffic exponentially.  As always, please let me know if you have experienced any bugs.

Take care,

-Jake

Ready for prime time?

Things are definitely improving around here and I think this puppy may be ready for prime time.

The latest upgrades:

1. Notification system is now in place. You will be notified when your site has been posted to the homepage. You will also be notified when someone leaves a comment about your site. So be sure to use a valid email address when you submit your site! Note: You can turn off these notifications in your members area under “email settings” if you would like.

2. We are now SEO and search engine friendly! Your sites will have a permanent crawlable backlink for the search engines to refer to, no dynamic urls. We are also not employing any redirects or no-follows. Just straight up links.

Thanks, and please let me know if you have experienced any bugs or issues with the site.

-Jake

Beta almost over!

The beta period is almost over and things are starting to run much more smoothly. A huge thanks to Ryan for helping with a couple nagging bugs in the categories! We are currently at 75 users and plan to hold off major release until we hit the 100 mark. Then watch out. It should get ALOT more active around here. Thanks again to everyone who has submitted a site during the beta.  Please keep them coming and don’t forget to also comment on a few sites when you submit one! 

-Jake