I just checked out the new Propeller design, and… Wow, I was a bit shocked. It took a few minutes to comprehend what the hell was going on and I found myself struggling with some of their layout decisions. Not only was I surprised by the radical new layout, I was confused by their new molecule looking logo. What is that thing?

It’s not often that I criticize someone’s work, at least not out loud. I usually keep my thoughts to myself and try to help. But, considering Propeller’s position and popularity I feel the need to share my thoughts and opinions. My intention is not to thrash their new design, which some of their more frequent users have already done, but to admit a few things I actually like.

I appreciate the little illustrated guy. He seems kind of fun with his little propeller hat. If only he spoke and told me how to get around the darn site! I like some of the larger text used throughout the site, although I felt a bit claustrophobic reading the headlines on the homepage. I wonder if anyone on the Propeller design team considered a liquid layout? Also, the large numbers are a bit distracting for me and it took a few seconds for my eyes to find the headlines. I would just rather assume that if it’s on the homepage it’s hot news.

The bottom line is that I found myself thinking way too much and spent a lot of time searching for navigation. If they plan to continue to compete against Digg, Reddit and others they may want to listen to their users.

I’ve been working on a site called Popvine for the past few months and everything was going great until the other night. Monday night I pulled down the htaccess authentication and I immediately started receiving timeout and 500 server errors. I built Popvine on a shared hosting box at Godaddy on top of a Wordpress installation. Last night I spent three hours on the phone with Godaddy (Not to mention their horrible customer service and turn around time) and was told that I was using to many CPU resources and that I could not run a particular script on their box. Unfortunately, the script they told me not to run is the engine of Popvine. I have a script called WP-o-Matic that runs a cron job every fifteen minutes and harvests feeds. Godaddy disabled my site by overwriting my root index file and moved files around, which I was told they don’t do on the phone while watching them do it in a FTP application. Here is a response I received from Godaddy:

Our administrators have alerted us to a problem with your site. It appears that your site was calling a wp-o-matic script that is filling up the apache error log. e have disabled the /wp-content/plugins/wp-o-matic/cron.php script, as well as disabled the cron job running against your database. We are requesting that your remove the wp-o-matic script from the account. Please note, if the script should be re-enabled, and this issue returns, your account would be subject to suspension. If you should have any questions, please feel free to either reply to this message, or you can call us directly…

I have a question Godaddy! Why are there 743 other sites hosted on the same box as Popvine, and why did you overwrite and move my files around? With the dissatisfaction I have with Godaddy I’ve decided to move my site to another host and get a virtual dedicated box that can withstand feed harvesting.

Goodbye Godaddy!

Understanding how users find, see, and interact with your website is a great way to improve your content, design, and navigation. Understanding your site will help you craft a better user experience.

There are several tools on the web that can expose telling data about your site. Below are 5 tools which will help you analyze your site.

Website Grader

http://www.websitegrader.com
Website Grader is a free seo tool that measures the marketing effectiveness of a website. It provides a score that incorporates things like website traffic, SEO, social popularity and other technical factors. It also provides some basic advice on how the website can be improved from a marketing perspective.

SEO Analyzer

http://raven-seo-tools.com/seo-analyzer/
This tool will show you the structure of your pages and help you achieve higher search engine rankings.

Summit Media’s Spider Simulator

http://tools.summitmedia.co.uk/spider/
This service provides you with a report on aspects of the page that are used to determine how highly in a search engine the page is ranked, and also gives some general usability feedback.

PageRank Checker For Your Backlinks

http://www.smartpagerank.com/pagerank-backlinks.php
This tool will output sites linking in and will list each of the links PageRank. You can also list out the links that have a nofollow attribute.

Crazy Egg

http://crazyegg.com
Create tests to figure out what people are doing on your website. This service presents the results using three different methods: Overlays, Lists and Heatmaps. The free version allows your to test 4 pages simultaneously and up to 5,000 visits per month.

Browser Shots

http://browsershots.org
Browsershots is a free service that makes screenshots of your web design in several different browsers.

W3C Markup Validation

http://validator.w3.org
Validating your documents is an important step which can dramatically help improve and ensure your documents quality.

Google Analytics

http://www.google.com/analytics/
Google Analytics offers a host of compelling features from keyword and campaign comparison to funnel visualization. This service is free and easy to implement.

Mint

http://haveamint.com
Mint is a self-hosted web site analytics program that offers information on your users, referrals, geo-mapping and much more.

DNS Scoop

http://www.dnscoop.com
Although DNS Scoop’s main intent is to value a domain, it provides some good info on Pagerank, traffic, and links pointing to your domain.

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