Website Critique and Beta Test Your Stuff Questions

[davidannis]

I am very intrigued by the Website Critique and Beta Test Your Stuff forums. They look like incredibly valuable resources. I have two separate questions about those forums:

 

1. I have a website that I am working on which is not really ready for a critique, but I just made a design decision, with which I am a bit uncomfortable. It will take a lot of time to undo if I need to change it later. Would it be poor form to ask for a critique of just that decision before the site is ready for prime time? I can just suck it up and take the risk if not doing so would be a breach of etiquette.

 

2. I really love the idea of having a wider group of people for beta testing. Some of the sites I'm working on are sites that anybody on this board could easily actually use (a set of SEO tools for example) but others are pretty specialized (software to assist in selling a business). If I ask for people to test the business sale website, will I get any takers and if so will the testers data be close enough to real data to make the test valid?

 

Thanks,

David

[.josh]

Umm, you can make a thread there and hope you get some bites, but in general most people aren't really interested in doing full fledged and thorough QA work without getting paid for it, especially if it involves specialized knowledge of the context.  Usually people will only do simple/easy stuff like scan for potential exploits or offer opinions on usability/design.   As the old saying goes, you get what you pay for.