Please review my puzzle website

Hello everybody! Recently I started developing a website about puzzles - www.puzzleprime.com. It features selected brain teasers, logic video games, optical illusions, etc. I would like to get your opinion on my design and the content. I haven't personally drawn the images on the website, just the concepts/sketches are mine (except for the stock photos here and there).
Also, soon I am planning to add a second banner in the middle of the homepage - do you think this is a good idea and is it worth to sacrifice load speed for better design?
And if I add educational materials (quizzes/articles) and "fun" section (geeky jokes/comics), do you think they will look unrelated to the puzzle premise of the website?
Looking forward to your feedback, will highly appreciate it!
Thanks, Artur

 

OMG PUZZLES <3 <5

 

site look wise excellent but font not looking fancy change your font and set fancy font.

 

Glad you like it guys. What alternative fonts would you recommend? And what additional content do you think it would be nice to be added?
My subscribers list is growing pretty slowly too - around 1 new person every 2 days.

 

That's the best or one of the best designed sites that I can remember that anyone has asked to be reviewed here, so yeah, I like the design and graphics. You can check your website's speed at https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/ and your website is already scoring pretty good.

If you want to add another banner on the home page, I say go ahead and test it out. I also think that the more that you add related, in depth and quality content, the better for your visitors and also for you seo.

 

Thanks learnwebsitedesign, I guess I will go on with the second banner and keep expanding then.

 

It's perfect as it is!
I don't know why, but design kind of heart warming...

 

Hot Pursuit, thank you for the nice comment.
I have made some changes to the design and the content on the website, would love it if you can take a look and let me know what you think. I am worried that the homepage may be a bit unbalanced in terms of graphics. Also, possibly the mascot appear too much over the website and gets a bit intrusive?
Best, Artur

 

I only looked at your landing page. What I saw there basically means your user base will increase VERY slowly. Why?

You make the user WORK to find links to other pages. I had to scroll down FIVE screens just to find the bottom of the page. The ONLY links on the WHOLE page are at the top and at the bottom.

You state "Make your selection below and get started!", but the ONLY links below that statement are the FOUR links (About Contact Thanks Others) at the very bottom of the page, NONE of which apply to your statement. You need to add links to the catagories you list so people can go to other pages.

Further, your call to action "Make your selection below and get started!" NEEDS to be ABOVE the fold and all of the links should also be above the fold. Very few people have the time or the inclination to HUNT for links. You need to make it as easy as possible for them.

Overall the grashics load so fast I can't measure their loading speed. VERY VERY GOOD. Some of the graphics look really nice, also.

Here are several things that need fixing:

1) The copyright bar at the bottom needs to be much smaller. Right now it fills 40% of my screen when it should be a maximum of 2 SMALL lines at the bottom of the page.

2) You have a BLANK LIGHT ORANGE bar immediately above the copyright bar that fills another 40% of the screen. No idea what it is for or why you need it, so trash it.

3) Next above that is a your welcome message filling 80% of the 4th scroll down. Wrong location. Welcome messages NEVER go at the bottom of anything! Would you welcome someone in real life as you leave him AFTER TALKING TO HIM FOR A WHILE? You would NOT! You would welcome him when you FIRST met, NOT as you are leaving!

4) Next above that you have your Join Our Community call to action graphic. Looks nice, but a call to action REQUIRES a method to act on. Further, you should never need TWO calls to action on the same page. Not sure what to advise here. Think you should trash one of the calls to action, and then enable links for the remaining one.

5) Above all of that you next have six headers with short explanations separated by MASSIVE EMPTY WHITE SPACE. I cannot see all six on a single screen - I must scroll. These are obviously what your call to action refers to, but with NO LINKS they are USELESS. You need to get rid of the excess white space and add links to each of the headers. Further, they should be AFTER your call to action, NOT SANDWICHED BETWEEN TWO DIFFERENT CALLS TO ACTION.

6) Next up the page is your "How do you want to puzzle yourself?". ONLY THE TITLE APPEARS ABOVE THE FOLD. To see any of the rest of it, I must scroll down. Not sure what to do about that.

7) Above all of this is your Puzzle Prime graphic. This graphic hogs 80% of the space above the fold. Either this must be smaller, or maybe the landing page should be broken up to encourage more visitors to stay longer. The space above the fold is where your call to action needs to be. A large percentage of visitors will never scroll down looking for a reason to stay on your site.

8) Finally, at the very top is your menu bar. The only thing that possibly could be improved there would be a slight smaller size to free up space above the fold.

I like your color scheme. It makes your page “fun” to visit.

I did not look under the hood to see what improvements could be made there, so I cannot comment about how useable your site is to your visitors.

 

Wow, thank you mmerlinn for the thorough review of my website. I assume there are some issues with displaying my website on your computer however, possibly you were using some screenshot service?
1) The copyright text is supposedly regular size font, with bold formatting, not sure why it appears so large on your screen.
2) On some webpage screenshots the prefooter content does not appear for some reason. On the light orange strip there is a newsletter and little graphics next to it.
3) Really good point, I was also thinking about this. Changed it to "On Puzzle Prime you will find:" for now, will think about something better to replace it with.
4) I'm not sure what CTA links I can add to any of the two banners unfortunately. If I remove the text from the second one however, wouldn't it look strange just a long strip without any context? Or possibly just change it to something which doesn't sound like call to action?
5) The big pictures/headers themselves are links. I'm not sure why such big empty space appears between them, I've adjusted it to be as little as possible currently (using SquareSpace).
6) Yeah, maybe narrowing down the top banner would help, will think if I can do something good.
7) Again, I guess will have to think about some interesting call to action button. Maybe special welcoming puzzle or something... Thanks for the suggestion.
8) Unfortunately SquareSpace automatically shrinks the logo when I try to narrow further the navigation menu, and it becomes almost unreadable. This is something I would definitely improve once I migrate to a better platform however.

Thank you again for your comments and suggestions, appreciate it a lot!