I've been working on it for about 3 months... I'm trying to get feedback on any/all aspects of the site. Any suggestions or comments, positive and negative - I welcome. Thank you for your time. http://www.newsweight.com
A few comments for you: - Nice domain name. - i like the style, the clean lines are nice and the colours schemes are great. - i love the left nav, especially how it changes all colours for the site when you select News, Rec, Edu - I would probably load links in a new window, like dp does. - You might add a keyword cloud to see which of the categories are most popular - It's not instantly obvious what the ranking numbers mean, what does 3.53 actually mean? (ritorical ) - The individual blocks for each news item might be just a little heavy, not so easy to find the guts of the link. The heading is easy to read though. - Speed is good Hope this help. Thanks Jay
Thanks a ton for the feedback Jay. I agree with you on all of the aspects that you hinted could use improvement. It's always so helpful to have fresh eyes on something. - The individual blocks for each news item might be just a little heavy, not so easy to find the guts of the link. The heading is easy to read though. I changed the background color on the links to hopefully lighten the load... there was certainly too much color. - I would probably load links in a new window, like dp does. You're right - I will change this as well when I get off of work. It really could interfere if someone was in the midst of writing a comment and went to the news link to re-read a part of it. - You might add a keyword cloud to see which of the categories are most popular - It's not instantly obvious what the ranking numbers mean, what does 3.53 actually mean? (ritorical ) Both of the above are excellent suggestions. I will work improve on the information immediately available in regards to the ranking, and some creative ideas for browsing through articles, as you mentioned as well. Thanks very kindly - I truely appreciate your time and comments.
Ok. Some quick notices. - Color scheme could be more harmonic, I found color selections disturbing, on the other hand they might be "original" but maybe they don't fit with the content and idea of website. I think most disturbing thing are colors on 'news','rec','edu' leaves. - You could "fresh" outlook with one or two pics (logos), now whole page is just text and fonts are quite basic. It gives bit gray feeling of whole site. Otherwise layout is quite logical and simple to use, it's good. Categories which don't have any news, you could have some default text for them and maybe something like 'be first to submit news for this category'.. to give "catch" for filling empty categories. I think sites like this need really a lot user volume to "work", I hope all the best for working with your site!
absolutely, now links which take user "outside" of your news site are opening to same window, you should definetively change this.
Thank you kindly for the feedback odradek. What I was attempting to do with the colors, may not be working as I intended. In my head, I just linked News, Recreation, and Education to the colors that my life experiences have led me to associate them with. Pretty narrow thinking on my part. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to clearly show the overall content type. I'd like to use the least amount of actual images as possible. Perhaps it would be as simple as slight changes to the colors themselves? Agreed. I will try some things with the top of the page in an effort to make things less drab. I'll see if I can't come up with some small image icons to represent entertainment, recreation, and education. Thanks for the suggestions greatly!
When you say old style, are you referring to appearance or functionality? I'm trying to keep it relatively simple, but not retro by any means. Anything specific you can think of that would freshen it up sandossu? Thanks for the feedback.
the functionality is ok, even if you don`t use the latest technologies but the design seems old style. the colors and layout
Thanks for the clarification. I was hoping you were referring to the design aspects, as I have tried really hard to make things as fresh as possible in terms of functionality. The general concensus has been that it could use something to liven/freshen it up appearance wise. I have a few ideas that I will try later today, most of which involve changes to the top or title area of the page, and more frequent use of image icons. Thanks again for the feedback - I'd been looking at it for hours a day, and found myself in a creativity block. I don't want to just settle with okay, as I realize there is competition in this area and I really do need to have a "better" site to compete. As prior noted, it does take a high volume of visitors to make a site like this work properly. It's a risk spending so much time creating something like this but I'm putting it all out there, I'll do my best to make it as user-friendly and visually appealing as possible. That's all I can do, aside from promotion (which I'm not too great at) - but we shall see. Thanks again for all of your great suggestions. I am really appreciative of the time you've taken to help me on my little journey with this site. It's an open slate, anything can be changed at this point - so if anyone has something else, keep em' coming.
I think you got the hardest part done, now you only need to give it a more appealing look. Everything is clean and basically clutter free. You should first change your logo to something more modern. Try adding a few more WEB 2.0 graphics. The icons for voting on articles are horrible “I’m sorryâ€. I think you could do way better and it would give it a more professional look. Like I said before you have a good domain, good site, good idea but unfortunately bad graphics. If you change that I’m sure you’ll have a winner of a site.
You're absoluetly right on the voting buttons. I've made 3 or 4 different types, but none of them appealed to me. I'm pumped and re-inspired to work on it more with all the eye opening feedback I'm getting. I'm working off the honey-doo list (baby on the way) and I have to move all of my computers/etc out of the spare bedroom (future nursery) into my dungeon of a basement, so I guess I'll have to wait a bit longer to try some of your fantastic ideas on for size.