Jill Does Tooyoo (hotshotsdesigns.co.uk/tooyoo/)

Member Name: jillmurphy

Product:	hotshotsdesigns.co.uk/tooyoo/
Date:	06/08/02 (309 review reads)
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I've got my community head on again.

There are all sorts of reasons for being on dooyoo. Why are you here? To make some money? To practise your writing and get some feedback on it? To find out about places to go, films to see, websites to visit, books to read? To make some friends? To be part of a community? If you've answered yes to any, or all of these questions then there's a free, offsite, but related resource you need to know about. Come on a tour of Tooyoo with me, point your browser towards http://www.hotshotsdesigns.co.uk/tooyoo.

Ahhhhhh. Lovely. It's all clean and fresh and white and uncluttered. I reckon a super web designer had a hand in the making of this site. I do hate busy webpages, they give my ageing, myopic eyes trouble and this one is just nice. It's clear, simple, easy to read. And it loads quickly too, in a flash on broadband and in not much more time on dial up. We've made a good start haven't we? Let's start looking around. There's a nice message here welcoming all us dooyoo (and ciao) members to the site and I think the best thing we can do is rush straight in and register. THEN we can start looking around. Gosh, this is going to take us all of thirty seconds. All we need do is supply a username and a password and we're in! No inside leg measurements required on tooyoo. That done, we're taken straight to our very own page within the site. It's like a mailbox really, it's a page where all the other members can leave us messages. And within minutes we're getting more welcome messages from all the members currently online. Amazing! Well, not really, because the newest person's name is displayed up the top there, on the right, have a look, and all the tooyoo members are a wonderfully friendly bunch, they can never wait to say hello.

If we click on their names we're taken to THEIR own pages within the site. We'd better do that and say hello back
, hadn't we? Now the initial niceties are over, let's have a look at the links at the top, what are they all about then? Well, there's an ever present link back to our own page, denoted by our username, one called 'settings' which allows us to choose to remain logged in between visits, decide whether our name should be displayed or not when we're online, to make our guestbook (that's what you call our page y'see) visible only to us and not other members and also to customise the appearance of our own page. I'm going to make mine a lovely restful mixture of mauve and pale blue. You can go technicolour if you like, lots of people do! There's also a help button which will explain to you how you can make the messages you'll be typing prettier, with bold and italics and smilies and all that jazz. What else? Oh yes, a link to dooyoo itself, a dooyoo-related chatroom (nice in there it is) and a list of all the current members. Wow! There are 361 of them! Quite a large community of opinionaters, eh? Clearly this is the place to be.

Let's see what that 'general message area' is, the one that's linked to under the box where people type their messages. Ooh super, they're talking about tea and wine and chocolate at the moment. Looking back, over the last couple of days they've talked about anything and everything from posting their latest to poems and links to silly pictures on the web to the latest dooyoo gossip and what's good on telly. It's all very friendly and lighthearted and not intimidating at all at all at all. I think we'll be joining in with this bit as soon as possible, don't you? It looks fun! Last, but not least, let's go back to the home page. There were some things there we haven't investigated yet. Let's see what the postcards are. Ooh, what a cool idea, it must be new as there's only one postcard so far, but the idea is that any member on holiday send
s a postcard to the tooyoo administrator and he'll scan it and post it for everyone to see. TheDuke's in New Zealand dontchaknow, lucky pig! The links section has some goodies too: all the related opinionators forums, some of the members homepages (do look at Morgana's it's lovely) and any sites the membership think might amuse you. I know a very funny site I think I'll suggest actually.

And that's tooyoo.

It's run by dooyoo and ciao user ILoveJackDaniels, aka Dave, on his own bandwidth at his own expense. And it's a fantastic free resource for all us opinionators. It's also a very professional site, something I think he should look at selling to other parts of the web. It's well-designed, slick and fast. Dooyoo aside it's a brilliant product (take note Dave!). But it's more than that: on top of the professional design, the speed and the ease of use, tooyoo has developed much further. The community of people is an amazingly friendly one, making your time there satisfying in many more ways than a physically and structurally good surfing session. It's a happy, social, bright sort of place to be, you know? Remember those questions I asked you right at the top there? Well, whichever of them you answered yes to, then tooyoo has what you need. If you're at dooyoo simply to practise your writing, then tooyoo provides a place where you can contact guides or other users to ask for help or advice and to get feedback, or to provide it yourself. If you like to remain fairly anonymous and private and would prefer not display an email address on dooyoo itself then it's ideal. You can even keep your guestbook entirely private. If you're in the business of making friends and being part of a community then you'll find it the most welcoming and inclusive place you could imagine. It's not cliquey or standoffish at all.

Ciao has its own guestbook facility and many people would like to
see dooyoo adopt one. Having used both I think that tooyoo does have certain advantages. It's a separate site and a fast one too. This means you're not suffering from the appalling slowness you find on dooyoo so often and it also means that you can, if you want to, choose to keep up with your messages and you're opinion writing and reading at different times. I do this, as it means I'm not constantly playing catch up on guestbook messages, fearing to appear rudely late in replying when people can see I'm out and about. Generally, I don't advertise my presence on tooyoo either, using the 'invisible' option. I'd dearly love more time to spend talking in the fun general message area but I just don't have the time, sharing a connection as I do with two youthful, enthusiastic surfers. Tooyoo also has much more functionality than the Ciao guestbook system does, allowing for private messages to be posted and many other things, and its separation from dooyoo has done much to encourage its community feel I think, as it's used in both individual and group ways. Tooyoo is an excellent site, and if you're a member of dooyoo I really think you should use it.

Kudos to Dave, and thanks too!

[Title courtesy of Auldmac. Sigh.]

[The Duke rocks. Double sigh plus grin.]

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