I'd like to thank everyone who took time to fill out my Site Improvement Survey. I appreciate your critique and ideas! A copy of Eric Meyer's book went to Alister, who has helped me stay the course and avoid turning this into yet another ASP.NET Tips and Tricks site (I hate tricks). That wasn't my intention from the beginning but I guess I needed to hear it from someone. Alister is also a very active contributor to the ASP.NET Forums.
I've changed a couple of things already as suggested by my readers. Let me go over a couple of issues/ideas that were brought up.
Forum
Everyone but one person said they didn't want a forum here. I felt relieved because managing a forum would've been a major hassle at this point. Since there's neither need nor interest—no forum.
Directory Of Vendors
This one is interesting. Half of people said they wanted to see a directory of other sites and/or vendors here. I'm still debating this... I don't want to turn this into a traditional link-galore directory because there are enough of them out there. Also, when I look at the list of commercial components at the ASP.NET Forums it sends me shivers down the spine because you can have a whole web site dedicated just to that alone. Any ideas what kind of directory you, guys, want to see here?
Colors
I understand green and grey aren't everybody's favorite colors. Since this is the first (and so far the only) skin I went with the old adage "Become similar before becoming different." At some point I will offer one or two alternative skins. Stay tuned. I'll probably publish a "series" of redesign articles much like I did with Microsfot.com.
Topics
Topic subjects are all over the board. The point of the survey was (and is) to refine the message this site delivers. This message is expressed at the top, "ASP.NET with emphasis on web standards." This is a very much uncharted territory as Microsoft seemed to build an extremely powerful framework but ignored the issues of standards. Therefore this is going to be a process of trial and error.
Interestingly enough, a couple of people wanted to see more on solving issues with webs standards in Visual Studio.NET. I've already written about two well-knows issues. Could use some more ideas.
Speel Chek
I laughed at myself when I saw a comment about typos and misspellings. I read an entry about a dozen times before posting, and after the second or third proofread I tend to miss typos. That's just the nature of the beast. You get so used to the text you don't see problems. At least my spell checker catches the blatant ones. I guess I could use help of one or two reviewers... ;)
Download Survey Code
The survey is built from an XML file and transformed into a server-side control tree with the help of XSLT. The idea is discussed in Creating Dynamic ASP.NET Server Controls Using XML by John Chapman. You may download the code of my survey and use it for similar purposes. Deployment of such a survey is really easy.
Again, thanks, everyone, for contributing. The survey proved to work great, and I will leave it up. Please talk to me. :)
