Ask HN: Review My Startup: Bookhu

First thing I noticed: "What Does It Do?" I wasn't really sure right away what it did. I found the "How Bookhu Works" box, but at first glance I thought it was an ad so I didn't even look at it.<p>My recommendation would be to put a small tagline below your banner. Maybe "Book reviews broken down by gender" or something.<p>That said I think the design is really good. I'd add some title attributes to the scores in the listings. It would be nice when I hovered over the 5 stars I could get a tooltip saying "3.4 out of 5 stars (from men)" or similar. Also the colored box with the percentage or men or women readers could use the same tooltip. At first glance I thought that was a rating out of 100. I know most people don't bother with tooltips, but do it for me?<p>I was on this page: <a href="http://www.bookhu.com/breaking-dawn-the-twilight-saga-book-4/" rel="nofollow">http://www.bookhu.com/breaking-dawn-the-twilight-saga-book-4...</a> and when I clicked the "Select Bestseller List" it scrolled me down for some reason. I searched the source for an '&#60;a name="menu"&#62;' but didn't find one.<p>One the home page with the slider, the arrows are stretching to the edge of the screen, but the slider container isn't. Here's a screenshot: <a href="http://imgur.com/8JVjN" rel="nofollow">http://imgur.com/8JVjN</a><p>When I use the dropdown to change the bestseller type, it disappears on the listing page and moves to the right side, instead of the top left. I'd keep it in the top left and put the list title right beside it.<p>For advertising I'd have to say that you should definitely start a blog. You've got some pretty cool data and you could run some interesting blog posts. Maybe do some queries and find the words that are likely to appear in men's favorite book titles, but not women's.<p>You could also do some sort of contest. I'd make it a "Men vs Women" thing to try to get people into it, and spreading it. Maybe a giveaway of a couple of books, or maybe Amazon gift cards. Maybe pit a predominantly male book against a female book and based on which one gets more votes, give the gift card to a man or a woman. I know if you put Twilight against something you'd have a chance of going viral on Digg, Reddit or 4chan. Those people hate Twilight.<p>Anyway, good luck with the site. It's well done.

I would make the "How Bookhu works" box stand out a little more. One thing I've noticed with all of the "review my startups" is that we have no idea what we are going to initially generally, and when we get there the first thing we want to know is - what does this site do. You explain it well enough, I would just make the box pop a little more visually so I don't spend as much time hunting around for it.<p>I found the site interesting enough to poke around a bit. Visually I thought it looked pretty good. I would probably make the call to action more obvious as well. Don't be afraid to tell people what you want them to do. The buy links are pretty small and not even very clear that I am buying them by clicking on them. Make them very obvious.<p>The "Leave a Reply" at the bottom doesn't make sense to me. What am I replying to? Is it just a spot for people to leave their thoughts on the book? Again, tell me what you want. Perhaps you could form it as a question. Try some different things and see what gets people to start submitting comments or reviews or whatever it is you're looking for there (or just take it out).<p>Overall thought I thought it looked pretty nice and it will be interesting to see how you do.

I submitted the same site in November last year - <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=902172" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=902172</a>. Since then I've gone through several point releases, a refactor and a design overhaul (I'm hopeful it won't be compared to a domain parking page this time).<p>I'd be interested in your thought and opinions. I'd also like to hear any thoughts on a marketing strategy. Looking at my stats, visitors seem to hang around on the site (as measured by avg time on site and pages/visit) for a relatively long time compared to any other properties I run and I get a fair amount of repeat visitsors. My biggest challenge at the moment is getting people to visit it in the first instance. I experimented with PPC (Adwords) in December - I'm no whizz so I ended up down, but only by a margin.<p>The revenue model at the moment is amazon affiliate sales.

I think you should have a longer delay on each book preview in the scrolling list of books at the top. I made it through half of one and then it switched over. 5 more seconds would be perfect.<p>The "How it works" box isn't very obvious to a first time visitor - maybe you can hang this somewhere off the top next to the logo?<p>I like the arrows on the left and right but I suspect that they would be too far to the sides on a widescreen monitor - I suppose you would know better what resolutions your visitors are using.<p>Otherwise I think the concept is cool, you might benefit from putting this out in the various book forums online.

I'll probably dig into it a little more later, but initially, on one of the book's detail pages, the text (and everything else) is pushed all the way to the sides of the browser window (in Chrome on OS X), so your "Feedback" side button obscures the content. See this screencap: <a href="http://i46.tinypic.com/oixe77.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://i46.tinypic.com/oixe77.jpg</a>

Why not move the "How Bookhu works" box to the top left? It doesn't seem like you need full width for the book scroller.<p>For the book scroller, shouldn't you add some functionality there inherent to Bookhu, like the ratings? It just has descriptions right now, which makes it look simply like a catalog.

A few questions (I don't mean to sound overly brief or critical - it's a nice site - but I'm at work so can't spend ages writing):<p>* Where do you get the data from about gender? Is it from users of your site? Is it from Amazon or something like that? I like to know where data's from so that I can make some judgement as to whether I want to disregard it. Data with no source definitely gets disregarded :)<p>* What am I supposed to do on your site? Just look for books and then follow links to buy them? Or can I rate books?<p>* Why are you basing the whole experience off of gender? I don't see why it's particularly useful to know what other men like, or what women like. I'd rather know what people like me like. i.e. like the whole Netflix recommendations thing. This just seems like a one-dimensional version of that?

Doesn't add value to my life. Can't really think who this'd be for.<p>Or is this just a tech demo?

Are you married to the "bookhu" domain name? I think you might have troubles with the phonetic aspect of it. How does someone pronounce that? <i>book-hoo</i>? <i>boo-koo</i>?<p>If you're totally set on that one, you might want to grab any phonetically similar ones like bookwho, bookhoo, etc.<p>I'm not sure how important the phonetic aspect is, but if it's too difficult to guess the domain from the sound of the name, you'll lose any possible traffic from "Hey, you should check out bookhu, I think you'd like it..."

Where's the data coming from? This is interesting as a sort of bookstore web-storefront, but the numbers look funny to me. <i>Catcher in the Rye</i> readers are 75% male? <i>Poor Little Bitch Girl</i> (by Jackie Collins) readers are 100% male?

Here's a quick mockup of a possible redesign for the home page. I'd make the book thumbnail bigger than I put it at, but you get the idea: <a href="http://i.imgur.com/Xqy7r.png" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/Xqy7r.png</a>

What's going on on the SEO side of things? You need to get your meta info cleaned up, running a site:bookhu.com shows that you aren't even including your meta descriptions, and you have a bunch of duplicate titles.<p>Additionally, why are only 46 pages indexed? Are there more indexed and I'm just not seeing them?<p>You stand to get a lot of really good long tail traffic because of the nature of your content, but if Google can't see it, no one else will. Get all that stuff cleaned up and that way you won't have to spend as much on PPC.<p>Shoot me an email if you want to discuss some of these SEO things, I can probably help you out: darrindemchuk AT gmail DOT com