Hello,

http://www.openxtra.com/

We have a site with ~ 1/3 million page impressions per month. The traffic is growing steadily too. We have just had a major re-write (well completely re-done it actually - the new site went live on Sunday). Thing is we don't get the kind of feedback from our visitors that I believe we should. I don't expect a deluge of emails, but I do expect more than say one per week that we get now.

We did re-do the site with feedback in mind, and I believe that we are doing things right. But I would be interested in your opinions, good or bad. It is very hard to get an objective view when one has been closely involved in the production process.

So, I guess I'm asking for the following:

a) what do you think of the site? &
b) how do we get more feedback from our visitors?

Many thanks in advance,

Jack Hughes

Your site looks very professional. The colors are good, the pictures are a visual help. I thought that there should be more decriptive text, more call to action. What do you mean by designing for feedback? You have the e-mail address on the top of your page and the small feedback button on the bottom, but there is no incentive or call to action for feedback. Maybe make a contest or a discount - make it worth their 2 minutes to evaluate the site.

Thanks for the feedback Steve much appreciated. The idea behind designing for feedback is that we make it as easy as possible for people to give it. So, on every page there is the email mailto at the top and the feedback link at the bottom.

Its interesting that you believe there should be more descriptive text. We deliberately went easy on the amount of text on the main pages on the site (not the articles/white papers) in the belief that people tend not to read stuff on websites. We will look into this issue again...thank you. As for the contest idea or discount I think that is something we need to evaluate too.

Many thanks,

Jack

About the only thing you can do for feedback from your users is to monitor thier activities and increase the content areas they spend the most time on. Doing this will give them a reason to come back and if they keep coming back they may eventaully comment. But comments are not why you have the site you are obviously selling services so I would think the best form of feedback you could get from the site is in the way of business referrals. Are you getting orders for your services and selling your software, By the way I never realized ethereal was a windows application been using it for some time on my linux box. Anyway I agree with the other poster the site looks great.
Cheers

MrUser

theLASTPAGE

Indeed Ethereal does have a Windows port that is very popular. Perhaps more interesting than that is that a project called Packetyzer is close to releasing a version with a beautifully crafted native Windows interface. Packetyzer uses the Ethereal packet analysis engine.

If you'd like to try the Windows version of Ethereal go to http://www.openxtra.com/products/

Many thanks for the feedback.

Jack