What Type of Sites Are Acceptable?

1744 days ago

This question is for web directory owners. What type of sites do you find acceptable to be included in your directory? I am talking about accepting sites in the general sense. Not  for a niche market or anything like that. I find it very difficult to figure out a way to truly do that and still make your directory a valuable asset for your visitors. How do you define good websites in the first place? And how to tell whether a website does provide some valuable and useful information? And with this information how do you judge a site? I know all of us have difficulty to determine whether a site is acceptable or not. It’s not an easy job to do.

For me, I first look at the following:

1. Design of the site. Yes, sure it does not mean that a well-designed website is good or even has any content. But someone made the effort to beautiful their site, so that someone did some work. It’s shouldn’t be too far off for me to say that the site owner takes his/her site seriously.

2.  Relevant content. This is a very important criteria for me to judge a site. Content must be relevant to the site’s subject and topic. No point having tons and tons of information that are meant to be spider bait but of no use to the visitors. Visitors expect certain information to be on a site and these should of course be related to the main theme of the site. Even flash sites can have relevant information. Flash game sites are an good example.

3. Writing style. A simple read of the main page and you can at least understand what the site is about. It’s about how well the content is written and it would show that the site owner has made the effort to really write content for their site. I have seen a lot of poorly written sites which I am sure anyone reading it will know that the site isn’t serious.

4. Text? Image? Video? For me, it doesn’t matter. I am no Search Engine, so just because a site has a lot of texts doesn’t make it useful to me. Seriously, images and even video really help build up and improve the usefulness of a website. Readers will get bored too if you don’t have any image to spice up your website. And images or videos are important to help illustrate your point, it’s a superb tool if used wisely.  And I don’t need to mention to you how popular videos are on the Internet. Just think YouTube.

5. Links. I don’t mind links, just that a lot of websites, they have too many links. And worse, I can even spot those paid links, mainly from irrelevant and useless links to crappy websites. And these links are placed on their mainpage! What I find attractive are links to related information on other websites. Hey, that’s what the Internet is about, a linked group on the web so that people can find useful information easily. These is no single website on the Internet that had any the information in the world and it doesn’t need to refer to other sources. That’s next to impossible.

6. Advertisements. If a website has too many advertisements, then I will give it the boot. No visitor should be tortured into seeing so many flashy advertisements that it becomes more like a billboard than a website. Even if it does provide good information, it’s just way too distracting and it reduces the effectiveness of the site itself. I would say if a site has 1 or 2 advertisements on their page and it is not too prominent, that’s okay. Hey, webmasters got to eat right?

Hope that these little tips will help you when the next time you need to check your directory. If you have any good tips or techniques, I would like to hear about it. And good luck on your web directory!

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