A bit of a whinge

[Suzanne]

Hi,

Thought I'd just air some thoughts about how to improve the forums here.

For starters, I am keen to vote on the DesignContest postcard, but where the hell do you go to vote? There was no link in the email sent out to me, nor is there a link on the admin page. I tried searching for it and couldn't find it. Do us all a favour and post links to the thing - I think you will get a lot more votes!

Next, I would like to point out that I actually get PAID MORE for doing less work than what I do on here. Hence, I haven't posted anything for a long long time. What do I suggest? That picky people who want you to revamp your design more than say 3 edits, should pay extra for the winning fee. I don't see why I should do 20 edits when the original edit was complimented and said to 'be ok' by the competition boss. I don't expect to win, or to have a brilliant first edit design. But surely if I am wasting my time, I won't be led on to waste it further, especially if my design isn't quite it...I would rather be told so...after all, time is money!

Another gripe I have is that this website is waaay to slow to load. No wonder I don't visit much anymore - I have to wait 30 secs per page to load, and I am on broadband! Clean it up, I say, reduce the jpg qualities to min amounts, save them all individually and optimised and it should help. If you want help with this, you can visit me at: Short & Sweet Web Design

Lastly, I notice you put a lot of the same names in the design gallery. Wouldn't it be a good idea to showcase more individual people so that you can view the diversity of the DesignContest community? Not just the top 5 people? I know I would be more interested in looking at different people's designs.

[Imagenesis]

Voting for the Postcard is restricted to the design team, thus, you are not going to be able to vote for it. The newsletter was sent out to all members to introduce non-Design team members to some of the contests and prospects of Designcontest.net...And hopefully encourage them to join...

The work you do (I'm assumming in the Charity/Non-Profit Section) has much smaller prizes. In the logo and web design section, the garunteed contests have gone up to $200. Also, we have a set minimum required for each contest in order to ensure that it is a sufficeint amount to justify the outcome of the contest. Obviously with a higher reward more contestants would join the contest, thus creating more entries and a happier winner...

I currecntly have DSL(680ish kbps) and the site loads up pretty fast for me. It hangs up before loading any images but then loads them all up right away.

I'm confused as to what you mean "the same people"...Althougth it hasn't been updated in a while, the concept of the design gallery is to display the best works of the design team members(for potential cleints).

[illumina]

I am on a slow ADSL connection, and the page loads quickly for me. You might want to check your computer for viruses, adware, trojans, or backdoors.

[derukureetsu]

Slow ADSL here. It loads after around 5 seconds, but once it loads, it loads fully just like aE-COma's does. Of course, it IS slower than other forums, but that is okay, because I'm not refreshing 24/7. I'll just be browsing for a while.
A few seconds to load doesn't bother me. It is better than loading flash movies, etc, which take ages (like, 1 min, that's ages). I guess we just expect things to be extremely fast, because we are used to it. We get this feeling of "I can't waste even a second! I don't have the time!". Yet, when on the bus, etc, we are actually wasting heaps of time. lol.

For the gallery, once more people are excepted into the Design Team, so will the diversity and amount of designs displayed in the gallery.

Unfortunately, I have to agree that the newsletter wasn't exactly worded properly, because is said about "designers", not "Designers from the Design Team".

There should be ordered sections in the newsletter. There should be titles like, "Updates and News", "The Graphic Design Team", "Event: blahblah", "Revision of Rules & Regulations", "Statistics" (such as page views in the month/week, whenever the newsletter is sent, member sign-ups, contests made, etc), "News for the Designer" (A place for all designers, whether from the Graphic Design Team or not) and "Articles/Guides/Reports".
This would really help structure the newsletter, and create structure within designcontest and show that designcontest is organized and clean.

When the newsletter came (if that was a newsletter), I just thought of it as an e-mail. It looked nothing like an online newsletter (the ones I see).
There should be an option, whether you wish to have newsletter's sent with images, or just plain words.
For images, you could add advertisements, a small showcase of recent works by people, etc. Spice it up.

[jlinds72]

The email that was sent was not intended to be viewed as a "newsletter" , but more of just an email - and it was put together rather quickly in order to hopefully get more people to vote on the DC postcard design so that we can announce the winners ASAP - but at the moment there's a tie.

As far as the website loading - it really depends on what sort of internet access you've got. Will is going to be working on a new design for us at some point, as well as updating the homepage to reflect the new & current contests, and to be more informative and regularly updated.

The designer gallery is sort of a problem. The reason why all of the same people are in there, is because when the design team members were asked to submit work to it - the ones that are shown there are the only people that submitted work for it. We unfortunately can only work with what we're given.

I understand the comment about getting paid alot more in the real world, than for the contests here - but again, I think that everyone needs to remember that this is just that - a contest. I would like to think that everyone who does work for their individual clients gets paid alot more money. As far as I know - most of the people that participate on here don't do it for the income (although it can be a nice bonus) , but do it for the competition and chance to gain potential clients, as well as build their own portfolios.

Like illumina said - we have numerous updates and changes to the site in the coming months. An actual newsletter is one of these items on our list. Once we get the newletter together, it will be sent out on a regular basis - either monthly or bi-monthly - in order to update everyone on any changes to the site, new contests, recent contest winners, etc...

We've added two new Moderators, as well as 3 more Administrators just within the past few weeks, so it will take us a little bit to get reorganized and things running smoothly again. Please know that we have alot of discussions on the table, and are going to be addressing some immediate problems rather shortly, as well as working on several on-going projects that we know will be a great benefit to all of our members.

[Suzanne]

Hi Jenn,

Thank you for your reply - I am glad that my whinges became suggestions and are able to be looked at. It's strange how not many people posted to the gallery - you'd think they'd jump at the chance to be included on the net!

I must admit that I am viewing your website in Australia, and my partner believes this is why the site is so slow.

It will be interesting to see the new changes that come about to make DesignContest happen more.

Regards,
Suzanne

[Suzanne]

PS - When I said the site was 'slow', I meant that each page takes about 1-3 mins to load, which is a real pain when viewing threads.

PPS - Sounds like everyone here is helpful and ready to improve the site!

PPPS - With the difficult clients, it's more about the client asking 20 people to do 4 different designs and 20 edits each then telling each person how wonderful their design was, but could they just have one more different design from scratch from everyone (just when everyone thought the job should be almost finished). These kind of contests are a bit too elusive for my taste and I refuse to be a doormat (even for $20)...so please forgive me if I don't enter any more of these type of contests.

[illumina]

PS - When I said the site was 'slow', I meant that each page takes about 1-3 mins to load, which is a real pain when viewing threads.

PPS - Sounds like everyone here is helpful and ready to improve the site!

PPPS - With the difficult clients, it's more about the client asking 20 people to do 4 different designs and 20 edits each then telling each person how wonderful their design was, but could they just have one more different design from scratch from everyone (just when everyone thought the job should be almost finished). These kind of contests are a bit too elusive for my taste and I refuse to be a doormat (even for $20)...so please forgive me if I don't enter any more of these type of contests.

Even in Australia, the site shouldnt be that slow to load. If you havent got it, get adaware lite, its a freeware version of adaware, and it detects any adware or spyware on your computer (which can slow down surfing a LOT).

If you apply for the design team, you'll see the design team contests are rather different from the non-profit/charity contests. The prize for a logo is a minimum $75 USD and the prize for a template is a minimum of $150. Designers are only required to submit 3 designs, and any alterations the client wants can be worked out after the contest is over, if you feel they want too many, you can charge them, like for example, tell them they get three revisions free, after that its X amount of dollars for each revision.

[websmythe]

...PPPS - With the difficult clients, it's more about the client asking 20 people to do 4 different designs and 20 edits each then telling each person how wonderful their design was, but could they just have one more different design from scratch from everyone (just when everyone thought the job should be almost finished). These kind of contests are a bit too elusive for my taste and I refuse to be a doormat (even for $20)...

...If you apply for the design team, you'll see the design team contests are rather different from the non-profit/charity contests...

Just thought I'd ask in case I misunderstand and take things the wrong way ...In the context of what Suzanne said about "I refuse to be a doormat"... Is there a reason why Non-Profit/charity contests are treated differentlythan Design Team Contests?

Thanx