Greg Sirochinsky Redesigns High5Advertising

It no longer looks similar to Doug Bowman's site. Check it out: High5Advertising.com. I've talked with Greg on the phone a few times now, and he seems like a decent enough guy. Consider this drama all over with :)

Comments

[Chris Griffin]

Wow, now I see why he copied the design in the first place. He's an idiot

He went from a pirated CSS-based design to biggest flash file in the world. It took a whole 3 minutes to load on my business broadband connection at work!

SEO? Any SEO knows that flash is a big no-no, and especially a full-flash website that takes 3 minutes to load!

That's just the beginning, I could totally rip his new design apart from the cheesy copy to the typography but I don't feel like wasting more time typing than I already have.

[Lindsey]

Chris you said it all for me! What in the hell is he thinking? Now I love that shade of orange, but NOT that much of it. And the typography for the links, wtf? And maybe I'm just not getting it because I merely glanced over the copy, but what do the pictures of the resturants have to do with his web design achievements?

PS: Mike when I preview my comment, your design gets replaced by one of typekey's orginals (diff. shades of green).

[Mike Rundle]

Lindsey... I know! It's awful! It's a new "feature" that TypePad added that I only found out about a few weeks back when I left a comment. Damn Typepad....

[Honus]

First mistake: Bigass flash intro.
Second mistake: No "skip" button.

I don't tolerate that shit. If I can't access content within 3 seconds, I'm moving on.

[Zack]

And they actually get business? Wow.

[jen]

come on, that article on Tech Tailor says he lives with his parents, at 23, as a "CEO" etc. that says enough for me...not to mention the many typos and grammatical errors in his "professional" communications. Very entertaining though, and yeah, that new design is just...well, I will be nice and not say it, others already did. Don't even get me started on ylunch, with its one-state-dropdown in the search.

[Artemis Lisserman]

When you can create a restaurant site that has 30000 rstaurant on it, then in the span of one year create 40 restaurant websites, get 2000 daily unique visitors ( and growing ) to your restaurant listings, then you can begin to understand the work it takes to do so. It is true a lot of the sites appear to be cookie cutter html table sites. However in the time span that I had to create all of the websites, that was the best I can do. Added a skip button, thanks for the feedback.
We have a to build something that actually adds value to Chicagoland restaurant scene, then talk. Find a place to eat closeby is useful.
My clients are extremely happy with the work I do. Call them up and ask.

[John]

Artemis, I use Citysearch in Chicago as it lists more restaurants, and no restaurants have to pay to be listed on their site. It seems like every company who wants to be listed on Ylunch has to pay you guys, which doesn't seem like a very reasonable or democratic way of building up content.

How is Ylunch.com different from Citysearch and every other restaurant listing website out there..... I mean there are dozens. How is your site different? How do you offer a better user experience?

I was just looking for Indian food. I headed over to Citysearch and looked for Indian food in Chicago and they found 54 restaurants, but you guys only found 28 (and I had to count the rows, there was no "total restaurants found" area). Why would I want to use Ylunch.com when Citysearch 1) found more Indian restaurants, 2) offers reviews, and 3) offers a quick 1-10 system?

Here's an example of their restaurant profile page versus your restaurant profile page and you'll see how more value is provided at Citysearch.

[Artemis]

We are currently making basic listings for free to the restaurants in the Chicago area. The restaurants that need to be ranking high on Google/Yahoo for specific keywords are the ones that pay us to create a Ylisting page for them to be listed under a certain amount of keywords.

We also have reviews that you can leave with a star rating system 1-5, but our restaurant search is in beta stages. You cannot compare Ylunch to Citysearch just yet, however Citysearch does not have all of the restaurants that we do. They have some we do not, we have some they do not.

Indian restaurants are just one example. We are local search engine, where you search a specific area, for the closest restaurant of a certain ( cuisine, food type). Considering we have 2 people working on the website, we are doing a pretty great job. Obviously Ylunch can be improved with proper funding. A new search engine, and a lot more descriptions of restaurants is what is being worked for right now. In the future we hope to completely revamp Ylunch with newer technology, but all that requires resources and time. It is very easy to criticize, without knowing all of the details.

However, maybe I can bring some information to light, and clear up a few things. We are small company that specializes in ranking local restaurants on search engines. We are not Citysearch and please do not compare us to them. Citysearch is multimillion dollar company with hundreds of employees. Ylunch is a slowly growing company that hopes to one day compete with Citysearch. We offer similar service, but on a more human level.

What we offer Citysearch cannot, a personalized page with whatever the restaurant wants on there, be it coupons, events etc, pictures. It can be anything that a restaurant wants. Companies like Citysearch and I am in no way using them as a bad company example. They are great company, and I love their website. Companies like Citysearh cannot offer a personal service that we do. They have certain guidelines they have to follow, certain templates that they have to fill. Our Ylistings can be anything the company wants take Cafe Mistiko as an example. A simple yet detailed listing for a cool Cafe in our area : http://www.ylunch.com/deerfield/cafe-mistiko/cafe-mistiko.html
A Ylisting for a restaurant can look like anything that the restaurant wants. A mini website or a simple text listing.

This is just one example.. I want to hear about you feedback to making Ylunch a better place. I know when a new web site comes out there are always going to be people that like and ones that do not. We like all feedback that we get positive and negative, it can only help us make the website better and more useful to restaurant goers in the Chicagoland area. Please send me e-mails and I will be happy to discuss it further : artemis101@gmail.com

[Jack]

Okay....here's a question...I just visited ylunch.com and all of their sister sites...and they are blank. plain html. wtf happened? finally collapse?