As of lately, the site has completely gone to hell. For starters, almost all the “big boys” with their premier ads have pulled out. The only ones buying banner ads are NON-LOCAL businesses. Then again, how could you even contact them? The contact system has been broken for over 2 years. And to make things worse, using the contact form on the site has never resulting in any response.

But what is even worse is this: nobody is buying anything on that site anymore. And I mean nobody. The only responses you get from listings on there these days are people wanting to trade crap like horses and used tires. And while I don’t mind a good set of used tires for a used car – what on earth gives some of these people the idea that I would even WANT a horse?!

Of coarse, my favorite are the ones that contact you all day long to see how much they can talk you down on your asking price – yet have absolutely no desire to actually buy anything. They are simply curious to see if you would have been willing to take a lower price. I cannot cound how many times I have responded with “how much are you willing to pay for it?” and was answered “oh, well – I don’t really need it – just curious”. WTF?

You know, I own mycookietown.com – perhaps I should create my own classifieds site on that domain….

…one that filters out useless trolls and actually responds to the inquires of those willing to spend money.

- Dean

Check out http://www.cookeville.com

Things that just stick out at first glance:

1. Horrible jpeg image that is severely pixeled and looks as though it was spliced together with Microsoft Paint.
2. “If Viewing in I.E. 8 Use Compatibility View” – this is unacceptable for any serious production (read: well designed/tested) site.
3. Almost complete lack of spacing between text and page elements – both on page copy and main site links.
4. A right column cluttered with ads that have text so tiny you can not read them.

This entire site reminds me of the days of poorly hacked up Front Page sites of the 90’s.

Digging into the site reveals an extremely un-polished user experience. Now, I ain’t just saying this because I do web design myself, in fact heres some others locally that [as far as I have seen thus far] perform some outstanding web design:

1. http://www.one7media.com/
2. http://www.cookevillecomputers.com/ <– Pretty damn impressive for a “computer fix-it shop”
3. http://www.eyeblastmedia.com/
4. http://www.mmacreative.com/ <– A favorite, really clean

Cookeville.com: if you are reading this, please contact one of the people above (or somebody) to get things up to 21st century web standards!