Case Study Friday: Computer.asia

This week’s Case Study Friday features a great one word domain ending in an alternate TLD: Computer.asia. This computer site was submitted by Chris so let’s see if we can all give him some feedback on what he was done with the site so far and hopefully also give him some tips for improving the site.

To make things flow a little better I thought I would put some of my thoughts in bullet point form and then please chime in via the comments:

- I would try to stay away from dynamic looking URL’s like this: http://www.computer.asia/page.php?page=about as much as possible especially for static pages like an about page.

- Consider separating the TOS onto its own page instead of merging it onto the about page.

- The web 2.0 drop shadow is all the rage of course but spending the money to do a professional looking logo would be well worth the effort I think and the enhanced branding could go a long way to make sure users remember to type in computer.asia instead of computer.com the next time they want to visit the site.

- I really like the star ratings as it adds a nice level of interactivity as well as a value add to what is just a news aggregator essentially. That being said, it looks to me like every single article is rated 5 stars so there could be an issue there.

- I really do like the overall nice clean look of the site. The colors are great and I think its just the right approach for a computer news oriented site. With the addition of a professional logo and some buttons then it could look even better (I especially like the cool transparent effect for the login box when you click on “Login” on the top right).

- I keep thinking that there should be a test link to “Home” to the left of the “Published News” button.

- The site has 100 pages indexed in Yahoo and 522 links according to Yahoo Site Explorer as well as a PR of 3 so there is definitely some link building done so far which is very good to see. The one downside that I can see just from looking at the site’s link profile is that it appears that most of the links are domaining related links. This is not that bad because the computer niche and the domaining niche are semi related in that they are both in the “tech” family tree (although very distantly related cousins at best ). The potential downside to this domaining heavy link profile is that there could be some kind of filter that is tripped that discount the site links and in turn rankings to some degree but that is just my paranoid speculation. There is absolutely nothing wrong with getting a couple or ten domaining related links for a non domaining niche site but when almost all of the links are domaining related then there could be a problem.

- There is a lot of white space underneath the comment section of individual article pages like this: http://www.computer.asia/story.php?title=singapore-gets-google-street-view-finally – rather than have all of that wasted white space it would be better to show things like related articles, products to buy, advertisements, anything at all really.

- I really like that this site has a lot of different social media type features to stimulate people to interact with the site and leave comments, reviews, star ratings, tags, etc. One potential downside is that in order to do any of these things a user must first create an account. Making people create an account before allowing them to comment will dramatically cut down on spam but it will also cut down on good comments as well as some people just do not want to create an account for whatever reason. One thing to consider would be to either open up the participation for non members or think of some different ways to inventivize people to become members like offering a members only newsletter or offering a point ranking system for members to compete against each other in some way, etc.

- The site should have more original content. It seems like most, if not all, of the content in the site are news feeds. The content is certainly relevant to the Asian computer market, but original analysis and articles would help with the search engine traffic.

- You probably shouldn’t show navigation to categories with no content. It’s disconcerting to check out a link from the menu and just get a blank page to appear.

- One really little thing I noticed that I like is the back-to-top button in the footer. It’s nice to have that little button to save my fingers from more scrolling

What do YOU think?

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