Alternatives...
 

Hey guys,

I've been away from the FS game for a while now... I've been concidering coming back, it's it seems so damn hard...

Some of you know me and my work and you know that I'm mostly not to produce a site in less an hour, like many other webasters...

I just read EvGenius' thread about his recips and I think what he did there is nice... Mainly the design of the recips, using the logs with hover effect and all...

I want to make something different from average free sites, mainly cause I'm not satisfied with my previous results... However the FreeSite/LinkList community have been so conservative so far, it's almost meaningless to try anything new - you get rejected, banned and whatnot...

I want to know, when the fuck are the bigger guys are going to make something in support of the *DIFFERENT* web sites... I need to make sure that when I've spent hours on a single site, it's going to get out there and not going to be rejected for some lame ass reason, such as "you have javascript"...

I know why you do what you do and I repsect your rules and everything, but isn't there anything that can be done for people that invest time in design and code to market better what they're selling?

I've always wondered this: Do webmasters complain about TGP's like this because they only accept galleries & nothing else?

I have a Link List. I list Free Sites. If you have a site that doesn't fit into the standard warning-main-gallery free site concept, I'm not going to list it.

As far as EvGenius, he made a bunch of fancy image recips - yipee. I want a text link back to me. There's a lot of people that make the recip links "fit" in with the rest of the site by just changing the fonts & colors.

Heh.. I know the rules and everything... however I have to run out now, so please flame away and I'll discuss that later :)

Greenie's answer was not satisfying, but very expected :)

If you dont like the free site model, then dont do it. Or if you didnt like your results, do something different than what you were previously doing, but still is a standard free site. If you made graphic heavy fancy looking free sites, try making plain ones, if you made free sites with lots of text, try making ones with less text.

Just because a site has a warning page, main page, and 2 gallery pages doent mean you cant do different things. There is still plenty of room for creativity even if you stick to the rules.

Like greenie just said, a link list lists free sites (even if you like it or not a free site IS warning-main-2 galleries), a TGP lists galleries (what is a gallery has already been determined as well). And like I said above if you feel those rules constrict you too much do something else.

link lists have rules for a reason |thumb (to all people that hate those - I know you do, so shut up and let it slide, epsecially clickbuster)

|haha



seriously though you missed out on the good ole days of free site building where you could do the things you are talking about, you used to be able to have pages n pages with links to tons of sites and do pretty much what you wanted within reason and all the scammers and cheats and scumbags took advantage and now you gotta play by the current rules... it's all about protecting the surfer first and foremost, figure out how to be creative and stay within the rules or find/build your own traffic and do what you want with it

Heh... anybody else?

Glad to know I'm becoming predictable :D

Let me use your example: if the LL doesn't allow you to use java, odds are it's stated on their rules page, which means you should not submit to them in the 1st place.

Without other specific examples - like the fancy graphic recips ones - I can't make any other comments as I'd just be speculating.

A bunch of examples of what I want to do:

I want to make a video free site that has thumbs of the videos and download links. When you click on the thumb, a player pops up (not in a new window, but on the same page) and streams a FLV (Flash video) version of the movie/clip. When the clip has finished, they can click on an X or anywhere on the page and it would close the window... If the user has no JS or it's been disabled, clicking the thumb would be the same as in regular video galleries - the file download will start.

Image gallery - you click on a thumb, a transparent gray sheet covers the whole page and a loading image shows in the middle. A few secs later the full sized image pops in front of the user. He clicks on the X in the top right corner or anywhere on the page and the image closes, so he/she can see the gallery and click on another thumb. If JS is disabled or there's no JVM, the full sized image is loaded as in any other regular gallery.

Those're simple, up to date visual improvements, that currently are not available to me or anybody else wanting to use them. In both cases the users will see loading, smooth graphics, no page reload, when watching movies they'll be able to see the loading progress, etc.

Tell me how is this not good for you or your surfers? But please don't give me the boring "rules are rules, so GFY" reply...

imo a free site is just another tool to get traffic, fancy recips and other facny things dont get you more traffic or clicks to tours, if you wanna impress reviewers and non buying surfers then thats fine with me

I'd try new ads or sales pitches to get more clicks throughs than the fancy stuff

I dont build many free sites much more as I am heading in another direction but I will always build them for the long term traffic and the trickles of sales you get

You're rather bitter, aren't you :D

Can you post examples of these 2 things? I'd have to see them in action before I decided.

I'd also like to hear why you think these are better - especially the movie thing, because regardless of it being your way or the conventional way, something "pops" and plays the movie.

All good points |thumb

Another reason to keep things relatively simple, is speaking for myself anyway...I don't have the extra time to scan heavy code, looking for nefarious shit. If it's all html, it's much easier to run through it quickly and know it's clean.

It's very easy to fall into the trap of spending lots of time making free sites pretty, when really the goal is surfers, you want to either to make the sale quickly or route them through to your internal pages. Once inside, sure...dazzle em with your technical skills (not sure that'll have much effect on the ol johnson though :D).

But, the primary goal of free sites is a pretty simple concept...traffic |thumb

Exactly :)

Surfers are not going to our sites for the awesome graphics, or because of how cool the movies load. They come for the free porn looking for a free jack off. Simple easy to navigate links that offer some free porn, but trying to get them to whip out the CC for the good stuff. At least thats how I've always seen my job.

|violin|
Freesites are freesites as defind by the webmaster you are submitting to. I try to hopefully make a freesite that most webmasters that run linklists will accept. As one of your 3 sponsor links why not link to a site that lists some of your new wave stuff? Test the waters there.

Which is why streamable video is preferable than download-to-play clips...

To respond to your example - first is that you really dont need java to imbed streamable flash movies - and it would just open a door that we dont want opened - same reason we got rid of the counters that used java when they started adding stuff to D/L to the surfers computers in the java code - but like I said there are very easy ways to have flv's play without the use of java
Second - you are assuming that most surfers will have flash 6.0 or later already installed which is not a good assumption - and with the amount of blockers out there that will block installations on the fly - you will be setting off the Norton that most unknowing surfers use - the two problems there are that the LL then gets a mad surfer thinking we are trying to do something to their computer, and second you dont get all of the views that you want from your approach

Overall - Im all for innovation - however - think about the tons of surfers that dont have the knowledge to configure their computers - they account for a large amount of traffic

To also go along with some other posts - try to keep your traffic from free sites as simple as possible - you only have 6 seconds max to impress someone - and Im afraid graphics wont do that for someone on 56k which still accounts for over half the surfers

The reason LL owners try to point you to keeping things within their rules is that we are selling a specific product - if you think that your approach would be a better way to do things - or even the other guy that wanted to try a different graphical approach - those are worthwhile goals to explore - but you would also have to set up link lists for your own sites to try them out on and prove the concept

Over 98% of the web users have Flash installed. Flash auto updates itself. I'm quite sure that 100% of the Flash users are up to date.

YouTube is using FLV, Google Video uses FLV, everybody uses FLV.

As for playing a FLV without JS, true, but how can you do it without sending the surfer to another page?

BTW, Linkster... thanks for the reply :)

Clickbuster - that number is what Adobe puts out - that is no where near a real number - its all PR
For actual tests done on peoples browsers there have been a few done - for the newest flash version required for inbedded movies about 55% have the upgrades needed - which means about 1 out of every 2 will not be able to see your movies

As far as inbedding the movies without java there are tons of sites out there with instructions on how to do it - you can even make a little movie player that pops on the screen the same way a wmv plays - which doesnt seem to be a problem in the LLs eyes from what Ive seen - to play a movie you always have to open another sceen or pop something - or in the case of something like youtube just playing right on the page

You need java for the transition.. unless you're linking directly to the FLV or SWF file, which would load in the browser normally...

However you can't do something like that without JS:
http://www.golidupeta.com/?novo_video=1

1 of the links on each row is an Ad, so watch what you're clicking on.

As for the compatibility issue - it's a rule in all link lists that the video should be downloadable... which means that when I do my sites there's going to ba a download link next to each stream. Also... you know that not everybody plays WMV, but there're a lot of people using it.

I seriously doubt that the percent of people having the required version of Flash for FLV playback is so low. And the numbers that I mentionned before are from stats that I've read long before Adobe bought Macromedia :)