h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Wonderful Idea but the whole design is clunky and takes a while to load. Maybe I'm just catching you on a bad day (traffic wise)but every other link doesn't work for a while but come back to it and maybe it does.

The hitch hiker's guide to the galaxy was, in my oppinion, about easy answers. I find some of the layouts here counterintuitive. But im not big on newsgroups and discussion boards.

anyway I'll give the guide a chance and put in my three cents.

Feel free to put in your three cents (or any other currency for that matter ) thats the whole point of this place.

Yes the servers are playing up under load and have been for a while but we are assured that it will be fixed.

What is it about the layouts that you find counter intutitive?
Fresh ideas are always welcomed
If you post the details Mark (the editor) and the team will have a look at them.

Absolutely - if you can suggest some improvements or be specific about things you don't (or do!) like, then we can look at what to do.

As for the site speed, we've had site speed problems for a while now. The stage we're at in the development of the site means we're reaching the top end of our capacity, but hopwfully we'll be able to pur this right in the next month or so. Sorry about the site reliability, but it's something we're still working on.

Mark

Nothing a few hundred thousand pounds won't fix I'm sure... if I had it to spare, I'd give it to you. Or buy a house. One or the other.

Really what I mean by counter intuitive, is there is a lot of clutter. As I see it the guide should emphasise the knowledge that the members have to offer, and a bit less of the whole "internet community" thing. I mean I like the whole concept, but I would think there would be easier access to guide entries. I'm not sure if you can browse the guide entries or not. If you are able to, I think there should be more emphasis on them.

The guide would be an excelent media for the casual user who is just looking for information. H2G2 could easily recoup the costs of extra bandwidth via links to advertizers (all very descretely of course) and to related books on places like amazon.com.

The site as it is now is great for the more dedicated user who wants a voice and is willing to contribute. There could easily be both. But when I first came to H2G2 I didn't understand at all how it worked. I signed up because I liked the idea of the Guide brought to the net.

What I expected was an irreverant encyclopedia of submited material. I belive it would be more effective for H2G2 to have a casual user browse the guide for a few minutes veiw a few ads, go to a few links etc. and then leave, as opposed to members who spend hours reviewing and submitting relatively large amounts of data and probably less interested in ads and links than voicing their own ideas.

Thanks for loaning your eyeballs
M-it army of one

You can browse the Guide - hit the "Read" button. That takes you to a page where you can get at the browsing categories (Life, the Universe and Everything of course), the search functions (which is actually more useful most of the time) and various other things, like the lists of recent additions to the Edited Guide and so forth.

And if we didn't have the Community Clutter, I very much doubt there would be anywhere near as much material in the Edited Guide or the Guide itself, because people wouldn't spend so much time hanging about here.

Indeed - h2g2 is not a traditional business-to-customer publishing model, it's a way of empowering people to publish their content to each other. That means we have a community feeding the Guide, a genuine voice for the public.

We could have just sat down and written a guide and published it, but what would have been the point? That's what everyone else does...

Mark

Well it would have been wrong, for one thing. At least we can pretend that this one's accurate.