Ideas To Improve Astahost - My thoughts as an experienced webmaster

One thing I see wrong already is the title, "Free Web Hosting" on the main page. This just screams unprofessional and tells people that Astahost shouldn't be taken seriously. I think you should change the title to, "Astahost | Quality Web Hosting for Free" or something of that sort. This greatly improves the standards and shows people how great the hosting here is, while the current, "Free Web Hosting" sounds like typical web hosting you can find at any other crappy free web host. Because who wants "Free Web Hosting" when they can have "Quality Web Hosting for Free?"

And the Astahost forums should have a name. If not, it just sounds more like a tool to ***** the website rather than a community. You should call it something like "Astaboard" instead.

No offense but I have found many grammatical errors on the site and forums. Honestly, no matter how good Astahost is as a host, no one will think that Astahost is the greatest quality host at first impression if the content mounted on Astahost looks like it was written by a First Grade Flunkee.

In addition, nothing on the site should be in caps, red or between asterisks because, no matter how important it is, it makes everything harder to read, basically. And also, don't use abbreviations. Not everyone knows that BW means bandwidth.

To sum it all up in a nutshell, please take my ideas and suggestions seriously. I spent a significant amount of time thinking this up for you.

 

 

 

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I agree with some of your points. However, about the abbreviations, it saves space. How much bigger would they have to make the area for that if they said 'bandwidth' instead of 'BW'? Consequently, they would have to remake almost everything in order to accomodate for the new amount of space that would take up.

Also about the caps and different colors, it draws attention to the particular points, maybe they don't have to be in caps but instead should be in bold or something of that sort, but it helps people to read the main points.

I do agree with some of your points about the forum name. I can see where you're coming from with the "Free Web Hosting" thing, but I think when it comes to a site like Astahost that's what most people look for first on a site, the word "Free."

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We thank you for your input and will make attempts to follow some of the suggestions you have given.

"Free Web Hosting" - When a person goes to one of the many search engines availible and they want information about "Free Web Hosting", they tend to type "Free Web Hosting" into the search box. If you want people to find you as a place that offers "Free Web Hosting", then you want the search engine spiders to index your site and find that phrase. The more frequently the phrase "Free Web Hosting" appears on the website the more likely it is to show on the first page a search results on the search engines. When I went looking for free web hosting, that is exactly what I typed into Yahoo and ended up here.

On to the Caps. We agree with you that the overuse of caps negates the efect of drawing attention to important information. Additionally, we consider the use of all caps in posts to be spam and take action to remove the offensive content and inform the poster that such practices will not be tolerated. The forum has a built in system that automatically prevents topic titles from being all caps. It works very well and in some cases, too well. Frequently I edit topic titles to change certain lower case letters to upper case to prevent confusion. The board uses the IPB forum script but if you but IPB in a title, it will appear as Ipb instead. I don't catch everything but I try to keep up.

The use of abbreviations on this site by the staff is kept to a minimum but there are things that are missed and some that are intentionally left alone. Your example of BW is a perfect example for us to use here. If you are looking for free web hosting and you feel that you have the knowledge required to be able to remain active in the technical nature of the website, then you should deffinitely know what BW means. We prefer persons that lack this knowledge to join our sister site Trap17 instead. We get a lot of people here that are looking for free web space instead of free web hosting and they simply don't have the required skills to keep up with their hosting credits. So in some cases the use of abbreviations can help users see that they may want to try other way to get web space.

Red text and other means of conveying important information. We have a lot of trouble explaining exactly what we are offering here and what the rules are. This doesn't seem to be an inability to provide the needed information but instead appears to be an inability to get new members to read the information provided. We have several post here that either spell out the system and/or rules or that lead directly to the information. We have to disguise the rules as popular topics to get people to read the information. See here: File Upload Instructions For New Users. This is just another overview of the website and links to the required information that every new user will need to find free web hosting with us. So, we use color, caps, bold font, and asterisks to bring attention to the important stuff.

Spelling and grammer mistakes. Sometimes we get into a rush to get this done and make mistakes that don't get caught or maybe don't get pointed out to us. Not all of the people tha thelp with the site are native English speakers. And only a few of us live in the United States so there are spelling errors due to differences in the spelling of some words around the World and grammar mistakes by people that only use English when they are online. Personally I am dyslexic so I have a few problems with spelling in particular. We request that you specific mistakes to OpaQue. He has full access to every aspect of the website and can make changes the most easily.

I know that this reply looks like an excuss as to why we haven't changed the items you have pointed out but in fact it is an explaination as to why we have done some of the things that we have done. I am sure that there are some things that we have just missed some things and we will try to look more closely and identify the problems but ask that you point us in the right direction. It could be that there are things that are all upper case letters that either isn't important any longer or was placed in caps by mistake. Your continued input is appreciated and we hope that you will continue to critisize the website so that we can make it better. By the way, I see a few misspelled words but for the life of me, I can't think of what is wrong with the spelling.

Keep the information flowing.

vujsa

 

 

 

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Honestly, that was what I was thinking too. As a matter of fact, the first time most people came here, they just look past it. I agree that there are plenty of cheap people looking for free hosting but titles say a lot, and even though "Free Web Hosting" helps out in the Google craw, you can still find the keywords, "Quality Web Hosting for Free." About Trap17, I think it should be the same thing and for ComputingHost:

ComputingHost | Professional Web Hosting at an Affordable Price


Yes, and apparently most people do. Eventually, you actually become familiar with it in your Internet endeavors and tend to not take it seriously. And if not, it kind of seems annoying. Personally, I believe making the text bold does the job more efficiently.

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Hosted members see a slightly different version of the website that contains less intense text. This is because if they managed to get through the application process, they probably figured out the system and rules. So the red text is is gone in many cases for hosted members.

vujsa

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I'm just going to come out with it right now: any site that offers practically free web hosting... ROCKS! I don' mind posting at all in your forum, and in exchange, with enough credits, I can have hosting for my website. It's rather genious, if you ask me. But yes, Cube Domain has some points - you should really create some different title that elaborates on your terms, because, frankly, they are really good terms. However, if a new consumer doesn't know that, he may pass right by it at the flash homepage that's a tad confusing. I happened to find this site from a web hosting search engine, so I was lucky. If you were to just find some way to tell a bit more about your hosting plan and terms without losing the customer due to long speeches, I think you could really heighten your customer load.

Nonetheless, keep up the good work.

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My suggestion: Make abbreviations links and display an explanation-box when they are hovered. I know that this is possible with just CSS. Could make an tutorial when I have time ^^

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I'm kind of have a hard time keeping track of which threads I posted on. Maybe there can be a section on our controls that says "My Threads" which can show all the threads we have posted on so it will be easier to check if someone has responded or not.

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Hi CroSpartacus,

this is already possible. The Link "My Assistant" (top right) shows if there are replies to your topics (that you started).
If you want to see if there were replies to the posts where you wrote, you can do an search. Klick search, then click more options. Enter your user name in the user name field and it will show the replies. This has still some disadvantages (Can not be bookmarked, because it has a temporary search ID and the "pinned:" threads are always on top of the list, even though they are not most recent.
Maybe this could be improved a little, but it is possible already.

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