I submit my site for review and analysis.... please don't hold back... what do you folks think? A real work of art eh?

www.jmrtechnet.com

Thanks in advance for your consideration and criticism.

Hi Jason,

I think the problem that strikes me immediately is the logo. There's just too much empty space, and the text is not creative enough. The logo is one of the most important aspects of a website, don't underestimate it!

Something about the abstracts under "Featured News" and "Featured Tips & Tricks" bothers me. I think it's the headings. Perhaps the text is too big. Perhaps it's the font. I really don't know, but I would just play around with it. The two-column idea is good. Stick with it. But you might want to consider spacing out each heading, and perhaps adding some photos, or anything that might help the reader take their attention off of the extraordinary amount of text!

The right panel is just too jam-packed with information. Also, the blue links are unreadable over the blue backgrounds. The left panel, on the other hand, is a lot better. It could be even better if each link was an image. These buttons are your opportunity to be fancy! Add some flourishes, mouseovers, borders, fonts...anything that will bring the liveliness out of your website!

Finally, the bottom of the page. Maybe I'm missing some images or something, but is there a substantial amount of white space at the bottom? And does the purple bar really have nothing but a counter and "Site Map"? This is something that I think you should take a look at, unless you're betting that your reader will never get to the bottom of the page.

The most important thing is the headings (the navy blue backgrounds with the white text), as I mentioned before. They seem to be a recurring problem on the other pages of your site as well.

Good luck!

Conker

Hi! I am soo glad someone posted a reply here.

Conkermaniac, I have to agree with your analysis - some photos would help, within the text. I can see that your review here is very timely, especially since you note the amount of text in the right column. I had just finished "experimenting" with getting an RSS feed working, and those blue on black links are very disgusting to me. I'm still going thru the documentation for the software that will help me change their color. Its probably something very simple, but when it hit 4:00am, I decided to call it a night, plus my FTP server was screwing up , so I had to manually edit, plus copy and paste some code from a backup that got chopped off my footer file! crazy eh? Thank God for cPanel's file manager.

This is a very new site. I've just run across some other designs I really like, but wondering if maybe this simple look will work for now. I don't want to add too many graphics that might slow the page down, but maybe times are changing and it doesn't matter...<shrug>

I'm still working on some improvements. I'm still deciding what to do with all that "space" up at the top - lots of good real estate up there... I suppose I could add a few planets lol.. maybe some stars eh?

Jason,

Did you take a look at your website with any of the other browsers yet? I am using FireFox and the second column overlaps the third (the one on the right with the dark blue background).

Yikes!!! I just tried tweaking things last night to get the Google ads to fit right... now its all messed up.

Thanks so much for checking that out! I'm getting the same result.

Jason