Website Review and Suggestions

**ives0014** · 02-22-2010, 03:37 PM

http://chancellorofdesign.com

I created this site about 6 months ago using Joomla. It's a social-networking site for graphic designers, that also runs monthly design contests.

I have about 444 members, but I've hit a wall lately and am looking to reach out to find new members.

If anyone has any Design/Layout/Content/Menu/etc... suggestions that might help promote growth, I'm all ears.

**Knight13** · 02-22-2010, 04:55 PM

Your site takes a while to load, and when i view it with a 800 x 600 screen resolution the page does not go all the way to the right hand side.

**stableenergies** · 02-22-2010, 09:54 PM

I would agree that some of the pages take a little long to load.

It is very visually appealing, and I like the ease of navigation, but I think the same things that make it nice to look at also make it a bit distracting (if that makes any sense haha)

**rady** · 02-23-2010, 12:45 PM

i like the website how it looks.
good work.

**BrowserSeal** · 02-24-2010, 04:04 PM

I think the header is too large, it actually occupies half of the screen.

There is also some problem with "Connect with facebook" image, at least on Firefox - there are two "f"s.

**kylendm** · 02-25-2010, 03:48 PM

The header is a bit too large. I find the text in the header slightly hard to read. Navigation is good and the rest of the layout seems to flow nicely. Good job.

**ives0014** · 02-25-2010, 05:03 PM

Thanks for critique everyone.

I'm working on making pages load faster, but given the amount of content on my site, it's turning out to be quite a challenge! The background image alone is almost 300 KB, which I believe is a fairly large file size for a background image (please keep in mind, I just started designing websites about 8 months ago, so I still have a lot to learn about optimizing page-loading times, html, css, etc...).

PS - As far as driving traffic, I recently began posting articles and pages from my site to stumbleupon.com, and I highly recommend it to everyone. My traffic has more than double, and there are days when it will spike at 1000+ visitors. The only downside I've noticed to stumbleupon is that the visitors to your site are likely just passing through, perhaps checking out one or two pages, then leaving. Although, despite the high bounce rate, I still think the benefit of having ton's of visitors outweighs the negative of a high bounce rate (for mass marketing purposes).

**TMSG** · 02-25-2010, 07:10 PM

I think it would look better with a two column layout. It looks like a blog too much. A site dedicated to graphic design shouldn't look like a wordpress template.

I'd also get rid of the gray on the left side of your logo. I would look cleaner without the hard corners.

I like the background, transparency and color choices.