launchly

First let me say that, from what you said in the description, this sounds like a potentially interesting idea. That being said...

The landing page is distracting and seems a bit disorganized. There is a lot of "stuff" going on, most of which I'm not sure what the point is. The flash animation was not very informative for me. Why would I want that? Who publishes the serial stories? Fluffy-seme itself or can anyone contribute stories? It also ends with a "Want more?" that I assumed would take me to sign up but instead loaded something that I had to guess was a rotation of sample stories? I'm still not positive what it was showing me and making the user guess is a bad idea.

The logo needs work. I also don't care for the header font you are using for areas like Quotable. Speaking of Quotable, that section is way over the top with the rotating images. I'm not even sure what you're trying to show me there. I think that's supposed to be your Join Now area but the text that tells me that is way overpowered by everything else going on there and the heading of Quotable doesn't seem to go with Join Now.

The remainder of the page seems like a hodgepodge of randomness that, as a first time user anyways, seems incoherent and largely pointless to me learning about what fluffy-seme is/does and finding useful information. Your landing page should tell me exactly what I need and want to know without me having to dig and wade through a page full of oddities like "Play", "Blog", "Articles", "Extras", and "Off-Project". Oh yah, "Fluff your Seme" also sounds dirty for some reason haha...

The navigation is in a logical location but doesn't seem to go with what your site is about (or at least what I think it's about). You have main nav links to Members, Groups, Rewards(huh?), Photos(why?), Forums, Polls(what?), and Articles(what are these?). Where is the link to the actual serial stories that fluffy-seme is all about? How do I find a "book" I want to read? I think that would be one of the most important things to be able to do on a site like this.

The Join page seems to require a lot of information for me to get started (sex? birthdate? why?). There's also a random tweet/share button just hanging out in there on the right side that looks a bit out of place. After I signed up I got a page telling me you successfully sent me an email. Why do I care? I assume there is an email confirmation process but you never told me about it and don't tell me on the page after I sign up either. More importantly though, why is there an email confirmation process? Do you REALLY need a valid email address for some reason? Email confirmations are simply annoying and people will give you fake/temporary emails anyways so why bother? Most modern sites are seeming to move away from required email confirmations. They will let you in right away and give you access to the site. They may still send you a confirmation email to make sure they have an email address to bother sending mail to but they don't require it (see Twitter for an example).

Hope you find this feedback useful in perfecting your site!

Brian, thanks for the detailed thoughts. This is exactly the kind of feedback we were hoping for :)

To address one of your comments specifically (BTW Fluff your Seme sounds dirty because it *is* dirty hahah and intentionally so) we have email confirmation because we have had problems with spammers before and this has been remarkable effective to curtailing that. fluffy-seme has some internal social networking features that allow members to message each other and share stuff (in a limited capacity of course), so the benefits of keeping the Nigerian Princes with investment opportunities and the Lovely women from the 3rd world looking for a "chat" OFF the site far outweigh the inconvenience to the user.

Twitter, BTW, has had HUGE problems with spammers and hackers precisely because they DON'T confirm emails. (See the recent gorillapenis 4-Chan hit and the 5,000 scantily clad "followers" I have >.>)

It's true most modern sites are using services like Facebook Connect or Disqus and moving away from the sign up stuff, but we've found that the bulk of our users prefer to maintain strict division between their "Real Life" and their "Online Life". The vast majority of them do not use their real names online and they do not want their behaviors tracked and recorded. As fluffy-seme publishes writing designed to be provocative, titillating and fun, we feel the methods you describe in this case would actually scare off more of the quality users than they attract.

You raise some very good points about the navigation and overall "busy-ness" of the site though @_@ I'm kind of sitting here reading this, going to myself .... "Why *is* it that way?" So that's the value of a fresh pair of eyes I suppose.

Great great great concept! I'm so excited to see this. It feels like an online book club.

I was having a bit of difficult time getting to the actual content of the stories. I would like to see a TOC and then you identify which are old and new chapters...maybe I was having a hard time because of the hard to read images (see below).

Old/New chapters images are a bit hard to read...I'd make a different easier to read image.

My only confusion now is how can I create a story of my own. Is that something you need to approve? Or do I need to submit to you? It's not clear to me what the process for this is. I would really like to know how to create my own story and what the requirements are.

Either way, I like this idea and will continue to use it.

I didn't want to write all that Brian already did, so I just want to mention that I really did have a tough time with the navigation, finding the book/stories and the organization of the site.

Also, I didn't get a feeling for the "dirty" part so if you want that to be more obvious, you're going to have to do better than just a subtle header.

Well the dirty part is really meant as more of a wink and a nod to people would get the reference ;D

Thanks! :D Okay I've since fiddled with the navigation and the site layout and hopefully it is clearer and easier to navigate (will have to get back to you on the Old/New Chapter graphics though : / ) There are still some issues that have to go to the programmer though :(

As for submissions, we're not like (say for example) Fictionpress.com or any of the dozens of websites where aspiring authors publish their work. We pay our series writers to publish their original work, and plan to (hopefully) start taking submissions for new works in the fall, so right at this moment there is no process for that because we're not open to submissions. When we're ready the site will include details about how to publish through fluffy-seme ... which will probably be hard to navigate and confusing and we'll have to come back here and have you all kick some common sense into us lol

Ah ok, that makes sense. I'm just curious...if you're paying authors and this service is free, how are you making any money?

Service is broken up into levels not all of which will be free forever. They're free now because we came out of private beta like ... hmmm two months ago and so we don't have the strength to give subscribers their money's worth just yet.

Basically the business model for FS goes something like this. We believe very strongly that people WILL NOT pay for content, but they will pay for first access to that content and for the experience around the content. So serials are split into "New Chapters" and "Old Chapters" because when the site goes subscription the "New" will only be accessible to paying members. Which means that if you love a story you have to wait two weeks for it to be archived where you can read it for free and in that time you have missed out on all the discussion, and the fan excitement surrounding whatever has happened, plus even though the general forum is open to everyone there might be spoilers you have to avoid ... basically you're the odd man out.

We've taken to calling this Revenue via Peer Pressure XD and hopefully it will work. But we also want to get the traffic to support premium advertising and other smaller revenue streams as well.