Tuesday, July 12, 2005
Brainstorming (SiteSell report 2)
Today, my son Joel and I started on the brainstorming phase of the website he's building with SiteBuildIt! site-building tool. I'm observing him to see how well a novice at site-building can work with the tool.
We started out with the Brainstorm It! (the folks at SiteSell! certainly like to put exclamation points in their product names, don't they) research tool that's included in SiteBuildIt!
Brainstorm It! is a handy, multi-purpose research tool that, with a couple of clicks, quickly brought us data about the most highly searched keywords for the site concepts Joel was considering. Once we had sorted through the data and determined which keywords fit best with his interests, we added the supply data of how many sites were competing for those keywords.
The processing time for this step took a while, but really was comparable to the time you would spend researching the same number of keywords on Wordtracker. The only difference was that the processing time was all in one lump rather than spread over several steps.
My overall impression of the BrainstormIt! function so far is that it isn't a magic wand that suddenly makes it clear exactly how to organize your site. But, then again, anyone looking for a magic wand to do this isn't going to find it anywhere.
We gathered a very attractive set of 198 keywords to fit Joel's preliminary concept in about an hour's time (minus the time we took a break while it was crunching the numbers). There's more steps we'll take in finding related keywords tomorrow. But organizing them logically will be a human endeavor. Or I may apply a few other tools to the data to massage it into a form more familiar to my set-in-their-ways eyes.
But the test so far continues to show SiteBuildIt! to be a well-conceived tool that can quickly put a lot of essential data in the hands of inexperienced site-builders who might not know how to get it otherwise. Checking out the SiteBuildIt! forums, I got the sense that some were expecting it to do their thinking for them, but no tool will that.
I continue to be pleased with SiteBuildIt!
Jeff
Today, my son Joel and I started on the brainstorming phase of the website he's building with SiteBuildIt! site-building tool. I'm observing him to see how well a novice at site-building can work with the tool.
We started out with the Brainstorm It! (the folks at SiteSell! certainly like to put exclamation points in their product names, don't they) research tool that's included in SiteBuildIt!
Brainstorm It! is a handy, multi-purpose research tool that, with a couple of clicks, quickly brought us data about the most highly searched keywords for the site concepts Joel was considering. Once we had sorted through the data and determined which keywords fit best with his interests, we added the supply data of how many sites were competing for those keywords.
The processing time for this step took a while, but really was comparable to the time you would spend researching the same number of keywords on Wordtracker. The only difference was that the processing time was all in one lump rather than spread over several steps.
My overall impression of the BrainstormIt! function so far is that it isn't a magic wand that suddenly makes it clear exactly how to organize your site. But, then again, anyone looking for a magic wand to do this isn't going to find it anywhere.
We gathered a very attractive set of 198 keywords to fit Joel's preliminary concept in about an hour's time (minus the time we took a break while it was crunching the numbers). There's more steps we'll take in finding related keywords tomorrow. But organizing them logically will be a human endeavor. Or I may apply a few other tools to the data to massage it into a form more familiar to my set-in-their-ways eyes.
But the test so far continues to show SiteBuildIt! to be a well-conceived tool that can quickly put a lot of essential data in the hands of inexperienced site-builders who might not know how to get it otherwise. Checking out the SiteBuildIt! forums, I got the sense that some were expecting it to do their thinking for them, but no tool will that.
I continue to be pleased with SiteBuildIt!
Jeff
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