Please I need your honest reviews on yarnme.com.ng. It’s an online communty for Nigerians.
Yarnme started with Simple Machines Forum (SMF) Software, back in 2014, then switched to a custom made software in June 2015.
Yarnme allows users create topics/polls in any category of choice, comment, vote, like and bookmark existing topics like a discussion forum. It also has; direct messaging, #hash-tagging, @mentions, twitter like notification system, account verification badges for accounts of popular brands and other interesting features.
Yarnme attempts to connect users with each other by suggesting people they can follow, based on their interests, location and people they already follow.
Finally, Yarnme’s robust search feature lets user to not only find other users, hashtags, categories and topics but to search for relevant topics and people, based on location, for example ‘fashion lagos’, ‘web design abuja’.
Well to be honest, @_ugee I think you may need to improve on your unique selling points because the website shares striking resemblances with Nigeria’s no 1 forum (nairaland.com) both in layout and colour.
These are enough to keep people from seeing your website as a different forum altogether (there’s something called branding you know).
I was really looking forward to a website that at least had radar’s kind of layout.
To me it’s arguably the best there is in Nigeria. Cheers
Your site’s typography is a bit off. On the home page at least.
For example: I am pretty sure the Featured Topics part of the page is what you want users to notice first but it seems to be competing for attention with “People you may like” on the right. A reduction in font size or an increase in font size should fix this.
I think what will keep users on your website is the content of your website, this is why it is hard to understand why your website emulates one of Nairalnd’s flaws which is placing navigation above content. I mean, you want users to immediately be aware of what your community has to offer but for some reason navigation takes up 1/4 of a user’s display. WHY?
Put your navigation to the right/left side. Navigation is mostly important only to those that know what they are looking for but half the time people visiting your site don’t know what they are looking for (mostly people bored at work). This is why your content should dominate your homepage.
Another flaw of Nairaland you are copying is thinking that everybody has the same taste. An example thought is “Since a lot of people like celebrity posts, let us show our users a lot of celebrity posts and those that like sports should suck it”…
and that is how you lose your sports audience. What if tomorrow, More users like sports? what will you do about the lost sports audience?
Services that offer content for diverse audiences normally ask users for their preferences when they first login. check Quora, Flipboard, feedly, Apple Music, Spotify. You should ask users for their preferences and provide curated content based on preferences. You can automate this or use your moderators for this.
There is more but to be honest I am tired of typing.
Build your site as you believe a community website should be. Leave Nairaland alone. It took Nairaland up to 10yrs to get where it is currently. I doubt you want to use up to 10yrs to get to that level.
