Seeing How Others See You

An interesting way to see how other people preceive your web site is to search for your site on del.icio.us. del.icio.us is a social bookmarking website that lets people save and categorize – or tag – bookmarks online.

Searching del.icio.us for iMarc, shows me the most popular tags that other people have used to describe our company. These include photoshop, design, webdesign, tutorial, web, howto, inspiration, blog, among others.

del.icio.us also shows me what exactly which pages of our site have been bookmarked. I can see that 63 people have saved our home page. Clicking saved by 63 people shows me the comments and tags that those people have used. Popular tags for our home page include webdesign, inspiration, and blog.

One of the most bookmarked pages on our site is Will's blog about CSS practices. The del.icio.us page for that has some interesting comments. My favorite being, "i love the look and feel of this site."

True, you'll only see positive feedback on del.icio.us bookmarks—after all, who saves sites that they hate. However, if you care about your audience, del.icio.us provides an easy way to see how they perceive you.