SITE REVIEW: ballroombook.com

I love Ballroom Dancing and made BallroomBook.com, basically social networking for ballroom dancers.

http://www.ballroombook.com

Here is my only concern with the site: How do I get people over the hump of "Why should I bother to join?"

The site has most Facebook features but the big hook are the multiple feeds. Facebook has one feed - Friends. Where BallroomBook has multiple feeds (World, San Diego, New York, etc). I think this is a big selling feature, but don't know how to explain it on the first page.

The design can change, features will be added, but the biggest problem I think I will face will be overcoming the "yeah, so what" effect.

Looks perfect nice and clean!!!

I like the color scheme of the site, very appealing and appropriate to the content.


Continuity issue: When looking at the "Search People" and "Browse Gallery" page, the list of people have an alternating beige-ish color as a background. This is pleasing to the eye and helps readability. I'd suggest implementing the same for each item on your "Recent Activity" page.

Usability Issue: On your homepage where you have the Sign-Up and Register form, I suggest seperating each form element a bit more. Currently my eyes area bit strained when looking at the labels associated with each input field. Simply add a bit of top-margin to your labels and this should improve readability significantly.

These are more nit-picky suggesting because quite honestly the site looks great and there's not a lot for me to critique. I very much like it overall.

Good idea! I like the alternating colors too and will implement that on the feeds page!


I will check into that too. The signup page is the most important and I want to get it right.


Details are important!

I'd swap the locations of the "Existing Member's Login" and "Free Member Signup" forms. When I see "Sign up - it's free" in big letters at the top, my gaze immediately goes to the form fields directly beneath that text. I have no doubt that less web-savvy users are going to create a username and password only to be frustrated when they discover they've used the wrong form.

Existing users will be familiar with the page and won't run into the same problem.

Good idea. I flipped around the Existing Members login and the new signup.

This text under "Sign Up, It's free" :

"Sign up now and start sharing videos and
photos with thousands of members."

Makes it sound a bit like a youtube-flikr hybrid. Maybe change it to something a bit more broad such as:

"Sign up now and start sharing videos, photos, and ideas with thousands of members.

looks good, what software is that>?

It's PHP. Written by me.

The area above the images which state:

"Other social networks connect
you to your current friends
with varied interests."

and

"Ballroom Book
introduces you to new
friends with the same interest."

They're showing one below the other on my computer in Chrome 6.0, FF 3.5, IE8, and IE7. I think you wanted to show these above both images since you split them between two separate elements. Float the second one to the right and it should fix the problem. If they're already floated, you might want to mess with the widths.

Thanks, big bug there! Fixed.

My biggest issue is not with the technical with the site, but how to get people coming back. How do I make it so people will check their Facebook page, then check their Ballroom book page?

Sounds like marketing and SEO - which is out of my realm of expertise, unfortunately.

Facebook, in its adolescents, was 100% word of mouth. Get a few of your friends to sign up and encourage them to spread the word, get on different blogs related to ballroom dancing and comment on their articles while linking to the site.

I'm not much of a techie, but you seem to have a fair bit of knowledge in php. Why not give your site the functionality for a user to sign into their facebook from ballroom book. Or at the least, create a "like-button" equivalent for your site. You state that you have thousands of members on ballroom book. Is this true? If so, why not start your own marketing program wherein marketers could place adds on your pages.

Develop an api for people to create apps for ballroom book.

Create a simple script that pulls titles of dance-related books from amazon and creates a list linking to the amazon page. Do the same for blogs related to dancing. This will generate a lot of link-backs I assume.

You seem to have the right information on your site, just need to market. Remember, I'm not a marketing or SEO guru, so all these ideas might be rubbish.

I have 10 members.

Sign up for me. Upload a picture. Profess your love for Salsa or something.

Test the site. Try to break it. Then please share it on your facebook.

I have a suggestion for the membership log in... On the front page where it says "Existing Member's Login", right above it is a gray line that splits the two forms together...

Why not put that form in a background in that color with rounded off corners? The right side of that block could go into the screen, so only the left side would be corners while there is no edge on the right side (the end of the screen could work as an edge).

I like how you've done the footer (where the white starts off with the gradient, and the links/text...).

That logo that looks like a diamond doesn't make sense to me, but that's probably because I'm not a dancer

The links at the bottom footer (and right above the red gradient bar) could have a hover effect when the underline is removed when the mouse is over the link.

You can either hide the links "My Account", "New Messages", "Notifications", "My Galleries" and "My Friends" when the user is not logged in, or you can have the link lead to the login page when the link is clicked and the user is not logged in.

The buttons in the red bar on top... why does it have the red background? The gradient on that bar makes the bar look a little more round, and then it goes flat just like that...

I like the layout, design, color choice and the presentation. Really good organization there.

The source looks a little obfuscated, but that doesn't really matter Probably for the better. Just throwing this out there.

To be honest, the design kinda resembles facebook (so does the URL ballroombook), but I guess that's the idea... to get people familiarized and warmed to the site quicker. (It's a social networking site after all).

The links "Register" and "Login" should be neighbors (They are on the top right corner separated by links that are meant for members).

Now I'm on the page "Browse Galleries" the first thing that comes to mind is that the "Share" links (on the right column) don't have the same background hover (and display status) as the "Categories" links on the left column.

By display status, I mean "display: block;"... at least it doesn't look like that. (I like the share you have when you actually view the gallery).

(In response to people who said that this site needs Like buttons)... I think that's what 'cool' is for.

I like that little breadcrumb you got in the recent activities

World > California > San Diago... what happened to US? I'm not sure on what that is though... looks like a breadcrumb thingy to me.

Nice site though...

Wow that is good feedback. I can see at least 6 things I will change in the morning!