Website Review and Suggestions

**blaher** · 01-01-2010, 05:40 PM

http://www.blahertech.org/

I've been working for a while on the new design and content of my site. Everything on BlaherTech.org is spanking brand new and was released today.

Everything is valid, if you see otherwise, tell me. Almost everything should be semantic. It should also have a natural, whitehat, SEO format to it. Meaning I didn't do it for the search engine, but mearly for it to be accessible. I've incorperated a few technologies in to the site, such as; RSS, ATOM, Flash, Javascript, sitemaping, robots.txt and I wrote my own CMS for the site (called Placeto). One thing I also did, was I made sure that there was proper browser caching and I wrote a server side cache mod as well, so things SHOULD load pretty fast (when navigating from one page to the next or revisiting a page).

There may be a few broken links hanging around, that I'm not to concerned with. I'm also not worried about compatibility with anything lower than IE 7. However, I'm in need of getting feedback for any of the following:

How does the design look/feel?
Is the content easy to read and attracting?
If you have a text browser or you're handicapped, can you read and navigate the site easily?
If you had a different browser other than IE8, FF or Chrome, did you see anything that seemed wrong?
How is the loading time?
Any spelling/grammar mistakes?
If you decided to look for something, did you easily find it and what?
How do you like the toolbar at the bottom of the page?
Were you tempted and/or interested to click on any of the ads around the site?
Overall, what do you like and not like about the site?
Any other feedback that I could use to improve the site in any way.

Any feedback at all can help me to fix, correct or improve the site. Thank you very much.

**TRANZIT JIM** · 01-01-2010, 08:01 PM

My reviews, as I surf
I am surfing from Mozilla firefox in Windows.

The buttons along the top right
I like the buttons along the top right of the page. Love the way it highlights when you hover. I have a thing about that with my websites.

The only issue I would have is, how you use the same background color to highlight the current page you are in. I would recomend one of these two choices...

.....Use a different shade of grey for that link/box to that which is used with the hover background.
.....If you need to use the same color, then I would recomend you use border for one, background for the other, say use a border of that color around the link of the current page.

Upon entering the homepage
The images do come together each time I load or return back to it.
Like how I can click on the bottom to get rid of that bottom bar if I did not want it.

My Closing comments
Could you get an open source version of BASIC. It is a favorite of mine from the 1980s, and I still use it lots to create web pages with.

Looks good.

I could be back to get some code later.

**IVernex** · 01-03-2010, 06:12 PM

I like it the site itself looks awesome! plus nice cool things you have going.

**Johnyoung** · 01-04-2010, 12:31 PM

John Website Review

Banner - the color of the logo's background don't fit the rest of the color.
it dont look professional.

Nav. - it should all look like one image, not cut up and spread apart like you have
1 1 1 1 it should look like 1111, you know its hard to explain

Footer - its too big and it looks like it has no reason to move with the page so i think it was be static at the bottom

OVERALL - Its looks professional and some work can be done

**Knight13** · 01-04-2010, 03:10 PM

The only thing that i dislike about your website is the navigation and the toolbar at the bottom, the navigation is really big maybe make it smaller and i just do not like the toolbar period. otherwise it looks good.

**blaher** · 01-05-2010, 09:52 AM

I did manage to shave 10px off the nav bar and another 10px off the toolbar. I'll have to take some time to make the toolbar a little smaller though.

Thanks for the constructive feedback.

**whitehats** · 01-06-2010, 08:55 AM

Blaher, the first thing I notice about your site is the use of colors. The colors don't feel much lively, and you should make more use of the horizontal space. I believe that for the audience of an open source website you can risk going 1280 for your websites. For our footer gallery website Footerama.com, we have even ditched 1024 because our audience is web designers with mostly high-res monitors.

Larger fonts for the introduction text, move the current projects higher and highlight them. You can try splitting the screen horizontally with these two elements.

You don't have a lot of content for the home page. By utilizing the horizontal space, you can keep all the material above the fold.

**perseadrian** · 01-08-2010, 11:00 AM

Interesting website. I wish you good luck.

**toshiedo** · 01-09-2010, 08:19 PM

Pretty clean design, header graphic needs some work.

**blinkormissit** · 01-12-2010, 08:33 AM

i think the footer gets a bit in the way and it isnt obvious that you need to scroll down to see your 'top projects' bit.