My 25th review is a tribute to Mouthshut.com.
Last week of June, I was planning to buy a bike and my options were Fiero, Splendor, Victor & Caliber 115. I was going around my office to find who had which and trying to get their experience. That’s when a friend of mine told me about Mouthshut.com. First few days I checked out the site and got down some information and by the end I found I was hooked on to it like an addict!!! Then I decided that this is THE place for me. I joined on 2nd of July and started of my first review on my worst experience : Kinetic Style.
The response was warm and very much encouraging. Though I was a new comer to MS, I had been a regular contributor to my company’s in-house magazine as a Movie Reviewer. So that experience helped me following a format in all my reviews, thus enabling me to make my reviews planned, precise and useful to others.
Now let me get back to the actual review title.
MS is not something that needs an explanation so let me go directly into the analysis. In my 8 years of professional experience I have learned that the following aspects are the main points to rate a website. So I have used the same pointers to see how effective is MS to its target audience.
Purpose (5/5)
The Purpose of Mouthshut.com is well known to everybody : To empower customers with views from other customers. With this in mind, If one goes about visiting MS, there is no doubt that the customer is bound to benefit from the views expressed by many many MSians contributing to each topic. So the purpose of this site is well fulfilled.
URL (5/5)
The URL is pretty simple and easily remembered by anyone. It has two words whose spelling should not be a problem to any English speaking individual. So when somebody says ’’visit Mouthshut.com’’, the other person could easily remember it and access the site, instead of ending up in some stupid sites due to wrong URL. E.g.: https://indianrail.gov.in or https://irctc.co.in : These URLs are not easy to remember for a person hearing it for the first time. Hence the spreading of its popularity by word-of-mouth is limited.
Logo (4/5)
A Logo is what identifies a site or a product among users/customers. E.g.: Mercedes-Benz has such a powerful logo you will find Autowalas, Ambassador cars sporting that on them. Whereas HONDA has a logo which doesn’t enthrall like Benz.
The MS Logo is pretty funny but I wouldn’t give full marks to it. It looks cool but does not carry the strength and power this site possess. Nevertheless, it is not a symbol which takes time and explanation to understand. Should say simple, funny and cute.
Theme, Layout, Images, Look & Feel
Whenever you talk about a website these are the main issues that carry 50% of the marks for their rating. So lets talk about each of them in detail.
Theme (3/5): A theme normally is a collection of color combination used as a background, text fonts & sizes, Table (HTML) Colors & borders etc. In MS, they use variants of three major colors : Vermillion/Orange, Blue, and Light Green. It is the consistency of this colors across the pages, that is unique about this site. Still for a visually softer site, there should be one color (maximum two) other than black and white that could be used for fonts, tables etc. In that respect this site sort of lost some points.
Layout (4/5): Layout is normally the way the content of the site is arranged in a way that encapsulates the information in one page and at the same time it doesn’t clutter the first screen. Now about MS: You will find the latest HIGH and LOW ranking in the center, Site Links in the left, Member statistics in the top right corner etc... So should say this is a pretty decent layout.
Images (3/5): The images used in MS is not all that ok. Like in many cases the movie or product doesn’t have a picture at all. Also I have seen in couple of User Profiles, the user pictures are non-existent!! I mean it shows that small ’’x’’ symbol with placeholder when the .jpg file is missing on the server. That is a bad sign for any website.
Look & Feel (3/5): Since the site harps more on content, not much attention has been given to the look and feel . Fair enough, still would have preffered a more soft color than the white background, as it would soothe the eyes. One good thing is the font. Across the site, the font usage is generalized to Verdana, which is very cute and sober font in comparison to Arial and Times New Roman.
Content Update (3/5)
Think the content update is not that fast as one would expect on a site where information keeps changing every minute. Now in this case, there are two types of contents that get added : one by the users/members in terms of reviews/advices, the other is from the Management/Admin of site in terms of News, Announcements etc.
So there is no dispute on the updating of the first data as this is happening very effectively and is totally independent of the site maintenance team. It is the second one that is of main concern. For example the Just Chill Out contest was over on 20th of July. But you could still see the same under the ’’Current Contests’’ page!! Normally you would expect this to move off to another links say ’’Previous Contests’’.
Also the main page says ’’Status Last Updated: July 10, 2003 10:00 AM IST’’. So does that mean the Site was not tested for its performance after that? Should not we check these Status parameters for a site that works 24x7?
Ease of Use (3/5)
I think this aspect is very good in MS. You can reach wherever you wish to go in a few clicks and the Homepage is very much a gateway for all the links in the site. Meaning? If you observe in few sites, when you go to a new page from the Homepage, you will find some links which should have been available in the Home Page itself!!! So in nutshell MS is ’’Idiot Proof’’....
Just one issue : 8000 characters sucks. I have put it as blunt as possible. As an IT guy I can see that this might be because the Oracle DB allows only 4000/8000 characters for Varchar2 field. But just by upgrading the oracle version to 8.x we can reach huge sizes. More so when you use LOB (Large Objects) datatype. So MS should consider revising it. If displaying the review is a problem, then they can have a 2 page option for each review which exceeds 8000 characters....
Links (3/5)
Most of the links are very much functional and no dead links (URL Link without a page in the server). Only there are two issues which go against this :
The missing images in the Profile Page as mentioned previously in the Image section
Whenever you save a new/edited review, it displays a page where it shows the ’’Spelling Mistakes’’ highlighted. In this page if you click ’’Comment on this Opinion’’ / ’’Read all comments’’, it displays some page error!!! This is dangerous. Because normally this page is as good as it shows
Download Time (4/5)
There are approximately 15 images in the Homepage, which is pretty decent and ok. It is neither too high nor too low, Just right. I tested the site on a VSNL Dialup @ 48Kbps connectivity. It downloaded at decent speed. But some pictures cross the 1K image file size, which is the standard size for any picture file on a website.
Grrrrrr... 8K sucks... contd in the comments section...