Critique my site please: www.jobbanter.com

Dave!

You need only read the following background information if you want to; if you don't want to, then just visit www.jobbanter.com and let me know what you think! Thanks!

Hey folks,

I've been working on this site since March. It's my first "commercial" endeavour, as most of my previous websites have been about my music and so on. But I was hoping to make a little bit of cash off of this, with the ads and such.

I spent a good while trying to think of a good way to lay it out, but unfortunately since I'm self-taught (from online tutorials), and don't have any formal education in web-design, my skills are limited, so it was just too tricky to put my ideas onto... "paper" (electronic paper ). So I went for a template -- this one here: http://www.oswd.org/design/preview/id/879/
As far as I know I'm free to use it as I am. I've left the 'shareright' bit down the bottom, as opposed to putting my own copyright to it, since I'm not sure if I'm legally allowed to remove that. Anyways, I downloaded that template, and then edited out things I didn't want, and changed things here and there.

I also designed the banner myself, and considering I'm new to photoshop, and not terribly good at web-design , I think it turned out quite well. What do you think? I get some people asking me what a boxer (dog) has to do with jobs and careers, and I normally respond saying that boxers used to be used for laborious tasks and so on... but then I qualify it by saying that, it doesn't really matter what the feckin logo is! Once it looks good! I think someone else (DOLE?) had a zebra as the logo for his site, which I don't think is particularly relevent, but it looks decent, so it's fine.

emm..... what else...... oh yeh, I only uploaded the phpBB forum last night, and I think it looks quite good, and works well. One of the other members on boards is allowing me to use his webspace temporarily, so thanks for that!

What do ye think of the idea? I know there's millions of message board sites (like boards!), and there's loads of career sites (jobs.ie?), but as far as I could see, there is not alot of particularly successful message boards related to this subject (I've not heard of any, nor my family or friends... so it's obviously not THAT successful ). Monster.ie has a message board, but it isn't used too much. I think that this would be quite useful! I know that I would use it to ask questions of for instance, any Gardaí who register. It's one thing students talking to a career advisor, but at the end of the day, insight and experience from someone who's actually in the industry is alot more helpful.

I have no members at the moment, as I haven't been giving out the url (cos I only actually finished the site at 3am this morning Hardcore hacking!), but I'm hoping to find some way of attracting people from all the different industries, as well as students. The students part I'm hoping would be fairly straight forward... I'll have to design some posters and then assuming I'm actually allowed to, I'll put them up around my college. I'll also photocopy some small flyers, and hand them out around the college. I was also thinking of going to a few secondary schools (my old one, for instance), and putting some posters up there, with the permission of the principal.

Attracting the industry people is gonna be a bit of a problem though... I don't know how willing people would be to register, as there is no real incentive for them to do it, save them being really generous people, who want to share their knowledge! They've already got jobs, and I don't think most of them would want to chat about their jobs when they come home...
Anyone got any ideas for attracting them? I'll give it some more thought anyways.

I've got some Google Ads on the site, and I'll put a few more on (I'm still learning about this stuff), and a way I was thinking that would be good for making money, if the site started getting lots of members and posts, is if I contact groups or companies that would be specific to each industry (eg. Microsoft for IT, although I will not be approaching them, cos they won't be interested ), and putting their ads at the top of the specific forum for their industry. I'm not sure if I'm able to do that in phpBB, but we'll see. It's just an idea anyway.

Anyways, let me know what you think of the whole thing... go easy, I'm new!

Rollo Tamasi

i signed up
will give it the ol' look over later on, best of luck dave. You seem to be fairly dedicated in making this work which is nice to see.

forbairt

just looked at it ... first comment ... Sliqua ?

edit .... then I read your post

Dave!

Thanks fellas! Apparantly nobody else is as interested as ye!

Yeah error9, it's Sliqua... Nicest template I found!

So what do you chaps think of it?

matu

Attracting the industry people is gonna be a bit of a problem though... I don't know how willing people would be to register, as there is no real incentive for them to do it, save them being really generous people, who want to share their knowledge! They've already got jobs, and I don't think most of them would want to chat about their jobs when they come home...
Anyone got any ideas for attracting them? I'll give it some more thought anyways.

Maybe if you came up with a good slogon like other job hunting sites have along the lines of "find the job that is right for you", "are you happy in your employment" etc...

you could have the members signup to groups within the forum and send out emails to those groups i.e. mbr signs up to office group - you then send out an email say every week with all the links to the new jobs related to the office section of jobs. that way they will comeback to your forum just to see what the job is about and they will be reading the topics that interest them.
kind of a personal touch to the forum, I wouldn't do this tho until you have your site/forum fully functional.

see if you can get any radio spots or press releases in the papers, start off with local ones and build your way up slowly.

good work by the way all the best with this.

Rollo Tamasi

radio is expensive.

cheapest thing to do would be affiliation with one or two recruitment sites, that's what i would consider anyways.

matu

the radio idea was more of a brain storming thing, but you never know what people can do for you unless you do a bit of research and look into things.

affiliation with one or two recruitment sites

this would depend if the sites didnt see you as comp, they want to make thier money too but as I basically said above explore all your options and see what becomes of them.

Why not see if sites will do a banner exchange with you most sites have different kinds of users come to them and most people these days are always looking to improve there income. Attack the ad campaign this way make people see that you are offering them a solution.

Bananna man

Stealing my idea!!!! I've been working on a site for the last month or so that is slightly similar, although they are different enough to not be in competition with each other. I'll post it up here when finished so you's can give it the thumbs up or down

Rollo Tamasi

You have a nice logo which is always a great start. The bulldog works quite well.

Design wise on the main site I find it very boring tbh. There is a severe lack of colour and graphics. It reminds of working in an office with no windows. There isn't a lot going on graphically and it's very drawn out. If you look at the good recruitment sites they use colorful images to grab your attention. There is nothing on your site that does that for me.

I had a quick look around the OSWD and found this:
http://www.oswd.org/design/preview/id/2885
I'm sure there is probably better but I wasn't going to trawl thru 125 pages, I found that one on page 6. It's got some nice colour and is has a good layout for google ads too.

Have you considered getting RSS feeds from the big recruitment sites placed on your site to provide your site with dynamic content? Also newspaper RSS feeds would go down well too.

One thing about the forum I would try to avoid is to post under the username Admin. Whenever I see 'admin' I always associate it with someone acting the prick and who needs to be sorted out, it doesn't convey friendliness.

Try to work a CMS into the design too so that you can easily update your site but that's something for the future really.