There is merit in the argument that, on the internet, location is immaterial — but knowing whether someone is in India, or is an NRI, or is a foreigner, gives you an idea of their background and preconceptions, if any.

E.g. “Altman’s post is …”
Commented by Perakath, New Delhi - September 10, 2007 @ 12:37 pm

I’m sorry that you haven’t found anything insightful among IEB’s 500-odd posts.

Can you write a guest post or two for us? That might help our contributors

I assume you have some tracking software installed for the site? What does it say? Are the most accessed links visible at the top? Do people spend a lot of time using Search? (someone asked for Advanced Search).
Some features which thrill long-time readers can make life hard for newcomers. Do you see new people stumbling onto IEB daily or is it largely repeat customers? If you want to appeal to newcomers, you might want to highlight the “best of IEB” in some way.

Coming to specific suggestions:
* The masthead size is perfect. But put a picture with a light background, and you’ll gain some space to put the Contact Us, About Us kind of links there. No point wasting the sidebar for that.
* Get a tagline! I like taglines :)
* Sidebar overhaul: why a sudden diversion into external blogs before listing Essays and Longer posts? Why link to generic sites like Rediff, Google News, BBC, BSE, RBI etc? Trim that list mercilessly. For long lists like External blogs and Archives, show only the first few entries and a “more..” which opens up the rest on clicking (like YouTube video summaries). Get rid of the “Meta” category. Rename “RSS” to “Subscribe” and put it in the masthead and footer, and also below each article. Comments RSS link will be fine in the masthead and below each article (where it already exists).
* If you are going for a slightly magazine-ish look, add 4-5 tabs at the top (indiatogether.org has a neat implementation).
* Do you have many non-RSS readers? Won’t they still like to be notified of significant posts? Add a newsletter option where the user subscribes with his e-mail (See JoelOnSoftware.com for an example). Try it out for a month and remove if it doesn’t gain traction.
* The individual article page is *really* bare. A reader is forced to click the back-button to find new content after reading all the comments with interest! Try replicating the same sidebar here too. Or some way to plug in “Related Articles”. Or a list of other articles in the same category, just below the Post Comment form. Having that info Filed Under below the title is of no use.
* In About Us page, try to put a link to the list of articles by each person. Atanu Dey has no link worth writing about? ;)

Best of luck.

P.S: Just noticed that you have publicly viewable stats. Neat!

How about those links on the RHS while surfing the comments section?

Few suggested - posts by author - my vote too!

Good search feature - definitely would like to see one.

Please please do not screw up the font! Color scheme could be changed to more simple soothing colors as compared to present maroon. Masthead definitely needs make do because IE these days isn’t solely based on Agriculture!

3. On the right side, can you pls list the names of the authors? And clicking on an author, the list of all his/her posts could be listed.

We already have the list of contributors on the RHS. Trying to figure out if we can aggregate all posts by that contributor and provide a link

5. A specific “about us” which mentions who you are? what is your motivation behind running this website and who are the contributors. Maybe some information on how someone can contribute to this website.

Re the motivation: read some of the posts in the About Us section. Re contributing to this web site — pls ping me at prashant-at-stringinfo.com

6. You can maybe remove the comments displayed on the right sidebar.

Lots of votes for this feature, may keep it.

7. On the sidebar, links to some of the best economic/business websites that you would recommend.

Hmm, you don\’t like the blogs/ newspapers & magazines we\’ve linked?

Also maybe links to some of the govt ministry websites (commerce, finance, ibef, india.gov etc…)

Good suggestion. Everyone here is swamped and we may not have time immediately to surf the web for this. Is there any single site that has these links?

Thanks very much for even bothering to ask us ;)

Not at all. Thanks for stopping by.