I would like to continue our series with another very interesting site, called Simple Help. The site is owned by Ross McKillop and it was launched back in August of 2006. Since then, Ross has published approximately 600 tutorials split into several categories, one of them being Windows Vista. This site focuses mostly on beginner-to-intermediate computer users who want to learn how to do various things with their computers. As you will see for yourself, the quality of the articles is very good. This is why this site was already featured several times on important sites such as digg.com or LifeHacker.

Good things

• Good content - all the tutorials I have read explain very well what you need to do in order to get the job done. No important steps are skipped and the screenshots highlight all the important areas such as buttons you need to click or text boxes that require your input.
• Many articles about the Mac & Windows Vista - this site contains lots of useful articles that show you how to make your Mac work with Windows Vista or vice-versa. I think that defining this "niche" was a very good idea.
• The icons system - on the right side of the title of each article, you will see the icons of the products covered in the article. For example, all the articles about Windows will have a representative Windows icon. I found this to be very helpful while browsing quickly through the pages of the site.
• Simple site layout - focused very much on finding the information you need. When it comes to looks, the site is very minimal, with simple colors, split into very clear categories, with big bolded titles which tell you what the article is all about.

Top Articles

While browsing through this site I have found some very interesting articles on topics not covered on our site:

The differences between XP and Vista folder locations
How to create a custom Control Panel for Windows Vista
How to sync your Windows Mobile device to a Windows Vista PC
How to resolve Windows Vista Update error 800B0100
Using Boot Camp to install Vista on your Mac: The Complete Walkthrough

Things that could be improved

It was hard for me to identify any major weak spots. However, here are some of the things that I believe they are worth improving:

• Very broad content - the site doesn't have a very clear focus. There are a total of 21 categories, each with very different content compared to the others. The list of content categories starts with Windows (XP & Vista), Mac's, iPhone and ends with cable modems and web design. I think that focusing only on 2-3 types of content will help build a stable fan-base and raise the time visitors are spending on site.
• Small number of articles about Windows Vista - there are many articles in the Windows category, however the huge majority of them is about Windows XP. Even though the quality of the articles & tutorials is good, Windows Vista users don't have enough content to make the come back to this site very often.

Conclusion

I must say that Simple Help was a nice surprise. I visited this site only recently at the recommendation made by a friend of ours. Even though the content is very broad and there are not many Windows Vista articles, most of the articles are very useful and well written. I sincerely recommend it to all our readers.

Related articles:
How-To Top Destinations on the web: ITsVista.com
How-To Top Destinations on the web: the How-To Geek
How-To Top Destinations on the web: Windows Vista Magazine