Is This Site Dieing On The Vine? (General)

by Don Lester , Saturday, July 09, 2005, 05:43 (7225 days ago)

As I reflected on my previous question about the July exercises mysteriously disappearing I couldn't help but also start thinking of all the other things that seem to just keep going wrong. This site started with quite a bit of fanfare, lots of prompt attention, and lots of apologies for the 'startup pains' it was enduring.

But, here we are, several months later, and you are not only plagued by basic schedule problems (ie, delivering content in a timely manner), but the site itself has broken links all over the place. The most amusing was the FAQ that does not work, but that users are strongly encouraged to read because it is being 'constantly updated' with new information.

I took the liberty of running a quick scan of the www.improveyourchess.com and members.improveyourchess.com (I didn't even try the old hyphenated domain name that seems to have disappeared).

I found 74 broken links on this site, and this site just isn't very big (only 585 URLs found). That is 12.6% of the web site is links that just don't work. It took a whopping 15 seconds or so to find them using a free web site testing utility called Xenu, something which could be routinely run after changes are made to make sure nothing is broken by the changes.

This venture may well end up being relegated to the bin where poorly managed great ideas go. It really pains me in many ways since the concept is so good, and the potential is so obvious, yet all the chess knowledge in the world is not going to get it past the lack of a functional and coordinated implementation. None of the problems are communicated to the user base so nobody knows if management even perceives them as problems or if they are even being worked on.

If anyone is reading this, or even cares to know (management never seems to post here no matter what the question is), the broken parts of the site (and some other information) are as follows: