Fog of Eternity | Website design and discussion

I can’t understand the recent buzz about SiteHoppin’. The site says that you can use it to “browse the internet like an iPod shuffle” but if Apple’s design was this shambolic and the content so poor then I don’t imagine they’d have been so successful. And that’s not mentioning the glaring hole that’s open to spammers. Yet SiteHoppin’ apparently has 200,000 page views per day and growing despite its many flaws, so I had a longer look to see if there’s anything there.

Design

First impressions are not good. In face SiteHoppin’ looks to me like some of the worst examples of mid-90s site design. Garish, cluttered and unattractive, it put me off from the first moment. And things don’t get much better once you sign up and log in.

Navigation is clunky and unclear. Editing your profile doesn’t seem to be working properly. Setting up any kind of profile and preference system is confusing, and there doesn’t appear to be any kind of help system. And text appearance of pages is further hampered by the lack of any left and right margins at all.

Once I’d finally noticed the main ‘Menu’ drop down button (randomly situated about a third of the way across the top navigation bar and not highlighted) I did manage to find the how to section (unhelpful) and other functionality, but it’s all unstyled and hugely unattractive.

So basically if I hadn’t seen the SiteHoppin’ buzz and instead had just come across the site one day, I think I’d have browsed away immediately just because of its looks and design. Not only is it unattractive but its general usability is poor. Apparently it’s also targetting the mobile browser market, but I can’t imagine such poor design and clutter is going to show up any better on a small mobile screen.

How it works

Like StumbleUpon users can randomly browse through a selection of submitted sites (either generally or by specific category), and submit sites they find interesting. You also, once you’re registered, add “Your Hop URL” which I think is the site that you specifically want to drive traffic to - and this is an important part of the system.

SiteHoppin’ is a “browser within a browser”, i.e. the sites appear in a frame under the SiteHoppin’ banner. Not as elegant as StumbleUpon’s toolbar, but it does the job. Each site you see you can rate from 1-5.

Importantly, every time you hop to a site you earn 1 beer credit, and every time you rate a site you earn 5 beer credits. This is important because each 10 beer credits is supposed to give you at least one hop to the “Your Hop URL” that you’re trying to drive traffic to. The idea presumably being that the most active members of the SiteHoppin’ community have the greatest opportunity to drive traffic to their site.

Spammer’s paradise

The model of beer credits=hops is hugely flawed. The concept behind it isn’t too bad - that active users gain more weight. Except that rather than requiring users to actively hop from site to site, they’ve incorporated a “slideshow” button.

John Chow identified how much of a danger this is. It means that you can set the page to autohop indefinitely, racking up beer credits, and not have to take any active part. I left it alone for about an hour and ended up with 206 beer credits, which is supposedly good for 20 hops to my designated website. A spammer could simply designate their commercial site as their “Your Hop URL” and leave their browser site hopping in the background, racking up thousands of beer credits.

And if that wasn’t enough they’ve made the problem even worse by allowing for the transfer of beer credits between users. So it’s not just that one spammer who’s gaining credits and guaranteed hops to a particular site, it’s potentially hundreds all transferring their credits to benefit one commercial site.

33% is in Beer Stocks

In addition to earned beer credits you can also buy beer stocks. These are paid Wiki pages based on a keyword that you purchase at (currently) $10 per vowel and $1 per consonant. So for example you could buy sitehopping.com/sex. You can do whatever you want with that page once you’ve got it - embed your blog, e-shop, whatever.

33% of all SiteHoppin’s traffic is guaranteed to go through these Beer Stock sites, divided equally among them. Which is not a bad model for developing traffic, but again leaves itself open to spammers.

Not keen

SiteHoppin’ just looks…cheap. There are a couple of reasonable ideas in there but it’s cluttered and badly designed, and is just begging to be taken advantage of by spammers. Beer Stocks are probably the concept with the most long term potential impact, but not implemented like this. In the immediate future I’ll be staying away from SiteHoppin’

Related Links

• Make Money Online With SiteHoppin’ Beer Stock (John Chow)
• SiteHoppin’ and Beer Credits (Mashable)

Filed under: Review, Social Networking by Robin Cannon

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