launchly

I have to say, I love usefultools. The site is very easy to use and I enjoyed the colors. This may sound dumb but I think one of my favorite parts is your use of the footer space. I like that I do not have to click on another page to find out what useful tools is since you included your brief "about" text in the footer. Excellent use of an otherwise neglected area of the page.

The individual review pages are very well laid out and easy to read. Your reviews are also well written from what I have seen. Screenshots are nice and accessible. The page flows well and I did not personally have any problems reading the text. Do you find that more people still subscribe to your site with email than RSS and Twitter these days? If not, I would reverse the emphasis.

I'm a bit confused by your choice to push the email subscription so much with that prime real-estate compared to the relative smallness of your RSS and Twitter buttons

The subtext on the button/image to submit your tool is a bit crowded and difficult to read for my taste.

Design is nice and clean cut...cleanly organized! The submission form did seem a lil' long and I'd like to know more how you use that information if you're requesting it. Like the financial aspect and how did you get started questions...does that influence your rating at all?

I like the tool tags. I think you've done a great job at organizing your site. More people should take note on this!

Oh and I think this is a really nice useful tool :-)

@jmaite-Thanks for the feedback! No, financial information/how you got started does not influence the rating at all. In the future, we plan to include some different types of articles, including on articles about the process of launching a startup. So, we added those questions to the form in anticipation of that...but I've worried ever since that maybe we were making it too difficult.
Would you be more likely to fill out the form if we only marked the basic fields as required and left the others as optional?

Yes, I think I'd be more willing to fill out the form if you marked the basic fields as required and others as optional. I think it can be intimidating for new sites that don't really have the answers to some of those questions yet. At the same time, they should take time and think through some of those questions for their own good (like what's your company's vision and what makes it innovative and useful). It'll be interesting to see which fields you choose as basic and optional.

Having said that and knowing what you're using the fields for, I am interested in reading those different types of articles. I think some sites will still fill them out and you might end up with enough info to create the articles. So I'll suggest this, when/if you make the fields optional, maybe explain what they might be used for in the future.

Awesome, thanks!

I like this site. I'll use it a lot. I love to find new ideas and apps that make life easier. It's well laid out as well. It seems like a magazine. I think I might point that part out more..

Best of luck to you guys.

Mike Binder

Thanks for the review of Launchly! Very well written.

In looking at it I just noticed something else. I didn't see anything on there for getting your article traffic like a way to retweet it or digg it or anything. Have you considered adding something like that to help drive traffic to your reviews?

You know, there is a "Share" button-but it's on the home page and not visible when you actually go in to read the entire review. It probably would make sense to have it on the actual review page. I'll mention that to our designers. Thanks!

Ah yah, I had totally missed that. Definitely think it should be on the review page itself too. After all, how do I know I want to share the review prior to reading it?

Excellent point...we've added it to the review page, too. :)