The RSS Feed on the bottom left is a nice touch - I like that I can press a button quickly to get a loan throw all the css decs. into your DSAStyles.css where you apparently have some anyway. But that's a small point.
1) Three different 'Continue' styles. Any reason against making these the same? 2) Long left-side column versus a short right column. Anyway you can balance these out, or is the right side going to increase in length as time goes by? 3) The top looks extremely busy. How about a little space between the initial paragraph and the four images? 4) Where are the sponsored links coming from? They've nothing to do with the content, so I wonder just how effective they would be? See number 1 of what I say over at http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=43157#td_post_483702 5) How about creating a background coloured div, instead of a span, for "Recently, an interesting email came across my desk. I'll paste it below. This MAY be a good option for a student loan. Check it out. " - it looks semi-sloppy as it is now.
Not sure what you mean here. Can you explain more? Good point. It depends on what article is showing here. They rotate, so sometimes a short article may be there when other times a long article is there. I'm thinking I should add to the introduction and explaining of the webpage here. What do you think? Good idea The sponsored links are coming from the digital point coop? Is this bad?
RE #1: You've got this image - http://student.loanbegin.com/continue.gif, this image - http://student.loanbegin.com/contd.gif, and "Continue Reading..." with a blinking gif. Can you consolidate these so that you're using one style or another? Otherwise it looks like a hodge-podge of different content ... It's like having three different styles on three different areas of the same page - it just doesn't flow. RE #2: Good idea, and while you're at, make it sentence-style initial caps, instead of initial caps for each word (for readability). RE #4: When you can get contextualized ads, why not use them? It's like walking into a sports store, and seeing dress suits and high heels. If they're coming to your site, why not give them what they came to you for? Really, if you're getting traffic from it, use it.
I like your site, however in the article on your front page "No-Cost Student Loan Consolidation" - there are no spaces between paragraphs.
I thin you should remove "Free articles" and instead put categories under which articles are classified. Bcos, i think people come for specific advice and not general, Me thinks, you may have cats as "Cheap loans", "consolidating Loans", "bad credit history" etc etc Trade portal
Good call by chawlars. Just make sure people can tell, by looking at the listing, which articles are free and which are pay. Bad example: a money sign by the pay articles.
And that's a good standard to make. Unfortunately, I'm not sure that works with a) long articles (unless you cut the articles up into a number of pages - and I'm not sure that that's the best for printability, although if that isn't a concern then it's not a problem ). That would be a good test: If you could only fill a 800x600 space, star2323, what elements would you be sure to include? And, given that, are they above the fold currently?
You provide some good information right at the top of the first page. You have put a lot of stuff down at the bottom so I would assume that that is less important. Is this site in blog format? Your sidebar content extends way past the main content which might be due to lack of content. That will fix itself as you post more. I would try to match the sidebar length to the length of the content so the visitor is not forced to scroll past a ton of whitespace.
Looks good, only thing I would change is the spacing between all the text/graphics/ads at the top of the main page. It needs a few more pixels of padding, looks too cluttered to the eye. Overall though, nice simple design
Thanks everybody. I'm in the process of re-doing and cleaning up several different things right now. A lot of them are design and coding aspects which won't make the site look much different but will make changing and updating the site much easier!!
Hey everyone. I just released a bunch of changes last night. I still have several changes in mind but haven't gotten them done yet. I'm working on re-doing the left column on the homepage so it is not as long and it will balance out with the right column more. Work in progress!!