Launching a new Article Directory. Would like some feedback from people who article marketing to promote their Websites. http://www.informative-works.info
I think that the article page looks good. As for the home page I think you should make it more clear that this is article directory and people can submit content and also syndicate it. Otherwise well done.
I appreciate the feedback fellows. I am trying to view the site in Firefox, Chrome, and IE8. It was confusing getting the three column html 4.0 format. I figured out I needed to stipulate a body align and specify the width of a center divide to give the classic feel of tables. I believe IE8 gives the truest look of the layout. When zooming in, the entire page enlarges equally. Where Firefox is thrown off when zooming, only the text enlarges to a point where the display is altered. Chrome seems to be between the two. The text and the page enlarges. It seems most people are using IE, so it shouldn't be to much of a problem. Howinfo, I followed some of your advice. I only had login/register on the index page. I added it site-wide where the left menu template is called upon. I put some heavy thought on your feedback and realized some of the traffic would enter through an article or column, where they would not realize they too could post. @lou_cifer, thanks for the encouraging words! Ironically, some of my friends, that don't spend a lot of time on the web, didn't realize that is a common logo for information. Regardless, I like it too!
I also added the comment display between the add comment and articles. It pushes that add comment entry form down to the bottom of the page and displays the comments immediately after the content. I'm debating ascending or descending the comments. First comment shown first or latest comment takes precedence.
Looks good, but I would suggest breaking some of your content into smaller blocks of text. I just took a quick random look at the Green category. Huge block of text.
Hey Sylviad2010, I wish you could expand on your suggestions a little. Today I even checked out the layout through Mac Safari, it looked clear. What do you mean by the block, the <div> block? I am wondering if you are mentioning the article was to long or if everything ran together inline, without spacing. Thanks for the feedback Q_digits! I allowed pictures in the Articles summary and the Body of the Article. My thoughts are to minimize images on an Article or writing based Website. I have tried images on the side of the categories in pre-development but it was overpowering. Every Category in the Article Directory had an image beside the title. I'll keep this in mind. I had thoughts to include a background image on the categories and do white background div where the article content is shown. It could cause problems with reading making it clear.
Sorry, I thought you understood what a "block of text" is. A huge block of text is text with very little white space. One sentence after another, sentence after sentence, and no paragraph breaks. Your paragraphs should be no more than 3 sentences or 5 lines. This makes reading it less intimidating. When people see a huge block of text like the one I pointed out on the Green page, they think, "That's way too much reading - too much work", so they won't read it. In fact, they probably won't read anything else either, but will click away. You want to make it easy for people to read. That means short sentences (under 15 words) and short paragraphs (no more than 5 lines, about 3 sentences). White space is good!
Sylvia, I figured out where you went. That was outside the Article Directory in the Link Directory. The link Directory is not parsing the html coming from the database. It's something I need to work on. Thank you for the feedback!
first of all why did you choose .info domain? .org or .com would be better. site is good, but you need you make the image/picture/logo quality better. those looks very pixalated. its not hard to made good and standard nav bar.
I chose .info because the intent of the Website is to host information, an informative website (Article Directory). I believe .info is the perfect generic top level domain. I agree, a nav bar is easy to setup. I have a nav bar that displays above the articles and within the categories. I have a dynamic nav bar. When looking at a Category, it links back to the top level. When reading an Article, it links back to the top level and to the Category where Article is nested. That's one of the reasons I dislike images. I have photoshop on my Notebook Computer, I'll have to take a look at it on there. My Desktop doesn't have a decent display. Thanks for pointing that out.
I had messed with the border. I didn't think of only doing the outer-side of the outside blocks... I had a mild green background behind the columns too, then I made the image a little lighter than the others, to call attention to the Article Categories.
what i like in your site is that"you have arranged all things very well.........very impressive division....................