09-22-2006 10:30 AM
basschick when you ask for other webmasters' opinions, are you actually asking for opinions or are you hoping to have your text/site/graphic/idea validated?
i notice that usually when people ask for opinions, they tell one thing to the webmaster asking - almost always positive - and then icq each other and criticize the thing that was asked about as they did not do on the post.
people say i am brutally honest, but i figure if he/she asks for an opinion, and if i give my honest opinion, i'm helping.
one webmaster i know who shall remain nameless is mostly not into websites. he paid a designer to make a tour that just sucked - it was awful! but no one told him that -they told him it was excellent, so he figured with all that backup, it probably was. but sales dropped when he started using it and kept dropping. and since in reality no one liked the tour, affiliate hits dropped, too.
the way i see it, no one was doing him a favor by trying to make him feel good about a tour that they themselves wouldn't send traffic to. but everyone told me they didn't want to hurt his feelings. when he finally talked to me about this, he said he really wished people had told him the truth so he wouldn't have lost all that income.
the last few times i posted for opinions, everyone said nice things - which is no help at all - till i posted on the thread i wanted only to hear the negative opinions as those would be things i might need to fix. all the people who said "hey, great job!" or "i really like it" type of things suddenly DID have other opinions, and those were helpful to read.
so - how about you? when you ask, do you want real opinions or positive spin?
Bookmarks