Site Reference Forums

Welcome to the real world of the internet, Jan. Or is it the internet of the real world? Dunno!

Not all information can be gauranteed to be qualified information.

True! True!

Just a thought for all to ponder.

Yes! We've often pondered it.

It's pretty much how it is on forums, so it seems to me. The net has the potential to be a dangerous place which is a step beyond the confusion you've described. With good reason we don't let our children loose, unsupervised, on the net.

Given time, you'll develop a gut feeling for whether or not advice on a web building forum has the ring of truth.

One thing to keep in mind is that when you're getting something for nothing, that's generally just what you're getting. But here on SR it's different. For free you might get advice that is worth what it cost or you may get a site review or other assistance that would cost you $50 to $100, possibly more, from a commercial provider.

Not bad, huh? All you need to do is ask and sort out the rubbish from the good stuff. Lots of good people out there on the web.

Regards,
Laurie.

I agree... Since it's 'free', then you gotta take some things with a grain of salt. But spend enough time in any given forum and you'll slowly learn who's-who, and what's-what.

As far as a 'community' is concerned, I've been around many other site-helper type forums, and by far.... SR has the best Guru to Newb ratio. (dare I mention DP... Bwahahahahahhahah).

It's a roll of the dice, no matter where you go.... but I'd rather get advice, where the odds are in my favor.

IMHO (and only humble, because of my lack of knowledge-- give me knowledge and I start getting cocky ), some of us, who have been around for a while, STILL cannot be considered experts in many things. Fortunately, usually when giving advice to new folks, I do tend to tell where my "expertise" comes in, which usually is merely as someone who uses the Internet for a wild cross section of topics, but, on occasion, as a writer, and someone with marketing abilities.

Then again, I gage advice, even advice given to others, by getting to know advice givers. In most cases you can tell how good the advice is, by how good the website(s) the advice giver has. (There are two guys, one name escapes me, at the moment, who have no websites or one so unconnected to his business the blog doesn't really work for this purpose, generally disagree with almost everyone else, BUT are still worth considering their advice.) Along with that, while snooping around reading threads, I quickly get to know who's who. The only problem I have now, is remembering who's who, sometimes.

But, then again, even if the advice given is good, sometimes I can't figure out how to implement it and keep the concept I have for my sites. Ultimately, I know who my site is for, and must decide for myself, what's the best place/way of finding those particular beings. Hard to figure out as a noob, but most folks have always known who they want their audience to be, we just need advice on how to get the right people to see ours. Jan, I think you're already on your way to figuring out which advice is good, which isn't, and which can't be used easily on your site.

The only other hard part to figure out is who to give advice to and who to skip wasting time. I'll teach you how to do that, as soon as I figure it out. If you beat me to that lesson, please post your findings. I'm not the only one, who hasn't figured that out yet.

You also need to consider who your website audience is

A lot of people here are webmasters so you’re getting feedback form the perspective of webmasters…

However is your site targeting webmasters? Who are the people you want to attract to your site?

Whoever they are- ideally those are the people  you’d love to get to review your site ideally

They are the ones you have to please and get to perform your desired action- not a bunch of webmasters ;-)

So yea- while it’s great to get feedback about coding, navigation, etc from webmasters it’s also important to get feedback from a variety of people so you can see how your site appeals to various groups (and hopefully in there your target audience)