Introducing "Bike Node"... my new website

synchronicity
Posts: 1,415
Hello,
I Just wanted to share with you a new non-commercial website of mine, www.BikeNode.com
I've already included a back link to bikeradar.

Basically it's a cycling links directory I put together myself with over 130 categories already. This is a site to help connect the little guys together...
Feel free to submit links there & suggest new categories if necessary.
The best thing is for a simple listing it's totally free and there are no ads (just a link to my own two sponsors, that's it). Reciprocal links aren't even required... but obviously I'm grateful for any... it doesn't get any better than that.
I hope I'm not overstepping any boundaries by posting this here. I really feel that it can benefit many people. If not, mods can always delete this post at their discretion.
I Just wanted to share with you a new non-commercial website of mine, www.BikeNode.com
I've already included a back link to bikeradar.


Basically it's a cycling links directory I put together myself with over 130 categories already. This is a site to help connect the little guys together...
Feel free to submit links there & suggest new categories if necessary.
The best thing is for a simple listing it's totally free and there are no ads (just a link to my own two sponsors, that's it). Reciprocal links aren't even required... but obviously I'm grateful for any... it doesn't get any better than that.

I hope I'm not overstepping any boundaries by posting this here. I really feel that it can benefit many people. If not, mods can always delete this post at their discretion.

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Comments
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I've been working fairly hard in the last week on this...
Would anybody like to make any comments / suggestions?
I'd be very grateful.0 -
It's an interesting idea, synchronicity. A cycling portal would be very useful - in all of my WILFing I can't remember coming across one before. If it takes off it'll be an enormous site.
My first suggestion would be a brief description, at the top of each category, of what should be posted / can be found there eg. What's the difference between 'Online communities' and 'Forums'? What will you find in / is the purpose of, 'Travel' (supported tours, cycling holidays?).
Some links'll need to be in more than 1 category. <whisper>BikeRadar's missing from the 'Forums' and / or 'Online Communities' section</whisper>
You've missed 'Western Europe' from the 'Bicycle Organisations' category.
By 'bike advocacy' I assume that you mean cycle campaigning groups. I'm not sure if that should be in 'blogs' or have its own section.
I've bookmarked the site; I'll be watching with interest.
Good luck with it.A fanatic is one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject - Churchill0 -
You raise some interesting questions.
The category for Western Europe is there...
The thing is, there are currently 173 categories. But they can't all go on the homepage, otherwise it will look too crowded (and possibly decrease the google ranking).
So currently, each main category has a limit of 5 sub-categories shown on the homepage. You have to click the main categories to see the remaining ones... the numbers of sub categories shown can be changed easily enough. Curently they're in alphabetical order, which is not ideal. I'll check the code & see if I can put the most used categories (or biggest ones) first.
I'll definitely try to incorporate your first suggestion (brief description, at the top of each category).
"Online Communities" has now been changed to "Social Networks". I think that's a better heading for that particular section.
The idea of the travel section is of course everything travel related... bike tours, holidays, informative sites and of course bike hire and anything else that I haven't thought of. The difficulty with this section is that there are just so many potential links, so it needs to be organised extremely well... I decided to start with entire regions, as people tend to know where they're going first (and otherwise, I'd need to create these place categories all over again for each separate travel related thing).
I'll slowly add further countries, states major cities. I may even have to eventually create a subdomain for the categories which are region dependent, otherwise it'll be too hard to manage (same with the category bike shops, but I suspect most people already know all their local bike shops)
I know I need to expand the Racing section... I'm not into racing at all myself, so I suppose that explains why this aspect appears to be quite inadequate.
Bike Radar is listed in the directory... it was one of the first links I added. It's in the Cycling News section. The thing is, I don't want to start adding links in more than one category, as people will start taking liberties with what they add. When do you stop then? ibike.org was one exception, because they made a personal request.
Other than that, I want to provide quality links. I've added about 320 links so far, after visiting many more sites than that. Other useful link directories are accepted, but link farms are not. I hope people realise that my site will never be a link farm. For one thing, I hate auto-generated content.
The first link I rejected today was a new type that shows you all the things for sale on ebay... what's the point in that? Just go to ebay directly instead.
Thanks very much Crapaud!0 -
Nice clean layout, which I like, it means speedy loading times - especially as I am only on 56k at home (don't start).
Is the logo a bit too similar to the Cream logo??
What do I ride? Now that's an Enigma!0 -
Thanks!
I still have to fix the template a little bit... there aren't enough gaps in some places & other things weren't lining up properly.
I had not heard of cream before now.
The idea for my logo evolved over the course of a week... I wanted to portray the idea of a network of links being connected by a central node... I basically took several pictures of some chains (the left over links) from campy, KMC & shimano and outlined them in corel draw. I started taking away the holes in the outer plates & pins, and eventually removed the outlines altogether.
I'll post up some of the other logos given a spare moment. But I think simplicity is best w.r.t. the design of logos.0