Buzz

GumTree.com – Simple and Popular Community Classifieds for the UK

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Craigslist generated a lot of interest in how to run simple community classifieds. Yet the Internet is indeed a big place, so you’ll find that others are quick to follow, and exploit opportunities that Craigslist has failed to take.

Gumtree.com is a community classifieds service that is quite popular in the UK, offering a number of important categories, including housing, community, services, and, of interest to nearly all, jobs in Manchester. There are also Personals, Stuff for Sale, Forums, and what not for the Manchester area. There are a wide range of employers in the Manchester area, including The Co-op Group, Thomas Cook, Renovo, Cussons, and Newspapers, to mention just a few of them.

gumtree

With an Alexa ranking of 964 when I visited, and a ranking of 20 in the UK, GumTree.com really is one of the top websites in the UK at the moment. In fact, it ranked above Ebay.com and Orkut.com. If you are looking for information about the UK local classified markets, either as an advertiser or as a browser, it’s a great place to start, and advertisements are likely to attract a fair amount of interest.

The one problem that I had with the website is that during the early evening, I was unable to get pages to load properly or quickly. I suspect that the site’s popularity may make browsing difficult at this time of today. I’ll update the findings tomorrow if the site is any quicker in the late night.

Sponsored by GumTree.com.

Buzz: FormaSpace – create your own workdesk or bench!

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It’s not often that you find a website that allows you to create your own furniture, but Lab Furniture from FormaSpace does just that!

FormaSpace designs and manufactures their own “technical furniture, accessories, and services.” So while the solutions aren’t appropriate for the living room, or perhaps even your house, you might find a great use for them in your study, office or workroom!

In fact, I had great fun turning one of their plain desks into a multi-purpose desk for a workroom/computer room. Take a look and see what I did.

designeddesk-orig

designeddesk

It’s got two keyboard trays, extra lighting and lots of shelf space for systems, books and other junk. You can do the same thing from their 3D designer page. Now, if they’d deliver to Taiwan… But the goodnews is they deliver to Canada and the US.

Bench and Post designed by FormaSpace.

Buzz: Demerath Law – Nice Design But Get a Privacy Policy

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lawyer

These days, everyone has a website, and so do lawyers. Demerath Law, which specializes as a Nebraska Personal Injury Attorney, is the website of one such law firm which focuses on accidents, including workplace and recreation accidents. The principal lawyer at the firm is Larry Demerath himself.

It’s actually a very nicely designed website with lots of links at the top, right and bottom making navigation easy wherever you are. The overall feel of the website is a little dark, with the overtones of gray and black making it seem perhaps a little depressing. There are useful FAQs, news and resource links as well as helpful forms (you can see a mini-form in the image) and a larger form under “Get a Lawyer”. Both of these forms should elicit a lot of submissions. The presence of a phone number is also reassuring.

The lack of an email address, though, is an oversight as many people would just like to click and open their email. They may even wish to add attachments, such as PDFs in their initial brief. Another surprising omission is a Privacy Policy at the bottom. On such a sensitive website as this, this really needs remedied as quickly as possible. A search of the site map produced nothing on this at all. Perhaps the client-attorney privilege is obvious, but sometimes the obvious needs stating!

Overall, this website is responsive, thoughtfully designed, and attractively laid out. It should really complement the company well, and attract a lot of interest from clients, potential clients, and others seeking to do business with them.