I know a couple of folks behind this new site and thought it would be
worthwhile for the NANOG community to be made aware of it. http://www.serviceproviderworld.com/
It's basically going to be a directory of service providers across the world
- that's the plan as I understand it. End-users can visit and review their
service providers etc.
Personally, I think this is a great concept - I've seen some online
directories of providers and most of them are either entirely Canada based
or US based and in my opinion not that great. Please bear in mind that this
site is literally getting started - there is an email link I found at the
bottom of the site where you can email the group for
assistance/questions/feedback.
- Given the very early stages of the site, in terms of content, I
would kill off the ads for now. If you leave it ad-free for a little
while, I think people would be more willing to make use of it
initially. Leaving the ads in place, it feels like the sites purpose
might soley be for generating traffic to the ads, which hopefully was
not the intent.
- The layout feels very much like the common "free PHP app" format,
I'd look at tweaking the setup a bit and getting away from the
straight-line/box feel if you can.
While I initially really haven't had anything to do with this site other
than opening my big mouth about it recently, it looks like I may become more
involved with it myself
Yes, the advertising - just one small ad. The reason it was placed there is
because two companies have already stepped up and bought Adwords campaigns
targeting the site specifically. This is a bit of a marvel wonder per say
consider the site has virtually no traffic yet or content to speak of. I
think the plan was to hold off with any advertising but then this happened.
I can definitely confirm that it will NOT become an "advertisement bloated
site" for sure.
Regarding layout, nobody involved with the site is by any means a designer -
networks and backends yes, HTML etc. definitely not Site will undergo a
facelift in coming weeks for sure - please don't let the layout scare you...
