I've had my football website, Pro Football Critics, for several years now. I finished my new layout this past week, and have implemented it. I really enjoy this layout because it has a lighter color tone than my past designs and is less cluttered. One cool little thing you may want to test is the little double-box icon next to each headline. Hover over it and you'll see what I mean. I also created my draft section here: http://nfldraft.pfcritics.com/ I used the content management software called Coranto to manage my content/headlines etc. Let me know if you have any suggestions or thoughts, everything (negative or positive) will be appreciated. One note though, you don't need to mention the extensive loading time; I know I need to compress several of my images.
Hi, Before I proceed any further, I noticed a javascript error (as IE shows on the bottom left of the window) in your home page. OK, now to the rest. Kudos on a site well done. - Pros - Has a professional look - Nice color combinations - Love the rankings page - Site objective told nicely at the top right - Oh, yeah that box under headlines and rumors - nice job - Cons (may not be cons, but these are my observations) - Home page is filled up (the same comment people provide on our website) - I guess how to fill up the home page is more of a personal choice. The home page is nothing but a piece of real estate with scarce resources. So some of us want to fill it up greedily whereas others sparsely. So I don't know which one is better. But one thing I noticed on your home page is as I scroll down, the bottom left is empty and it kind of steps down from there to the bottom right. Don't know if that is optimal. - All the boxes are of different sizes (height, width) - so doesn't give a symmetrical planned layout - Fixed font size Later if I have more comments. One question I have is, do you use a standard template to design your page? I mean it is not all hand coded. You take a ready made template and lay out your page on that? May be we have to do that. Our site (SitesOnNet.com) doesn't have a good GUI.
Thanks for the comments stocknsurf Since there's really no sense in my addressing the pros (since they were praises, lol), I'll give a little comment on each con: - Home page is filled up: Yeah, I wish there was a way to make things less complex, especially the advertisements. Unfortunately, the profit in take on those is too tempting to resists - I guess how to fill up the home page is more of a personal choice. The home page is nothing but a piece of real estate with scarce resources. So some of us want to fill it up greedily whereas others sparsely. So I don't know which one is better. But one thing I noticed on your home page is as I scroll down, the bottom left is empty and it kind of steps down from there to the bottom right. Don't know if that is optimal: Yes, content is an immediate concern for me, and always has been. I do have some nice features on PFC, but it seems difficult to draw attention to the front page since most of my visitors come directly to my news pages via RSS feeds/Google News. That's where I hope I can draw people in to my new draft section, and then possibly form a more loyal fan base, which would allow me to be more creative in filling in the remaining spaces. - All the boxes are of different sizes (height, width) - so doesn't give a symmetrical planned layout: For the moment, I'm ok with the different sized boxes. - Fixed font size: I'll have to look into that a little. I actually designed the entire website using a simple text editor, as it comes easier to me after doing several redesigns after the course of several years. The only things I didn't hand-code would be the base design of the top CSS horizontal menu, and some of the basic Javascript applications. All of the tables, logos, gradients, font sizes, etc. I did myself. Once again, thanks for the input Any more comments are appreciated. P.S. Thanks for the Javascript note. I went in and fixed the issue. P.P.S. I notice their is about a 4px of white space on the top-right part of my page in IE. Anyone know how to fix that?
So are you able to make some decent revenue off those advertisements? But the price to pay for that is every time the user clicks on an ad they are leaving your site. But hopefully they will come back amd click more I read somewhere that to make $10 you have to have at least 10K visitors per day. Kewl. That should have been lot of work. So which editor did you use? I use the vi editor - my favorite choice. Welcome. P.S. If you have time/chance please take a look at my site (www.SitesOnNet.com) and provide some feedback. Thanks.
This is a very well done website, I going to read this more to keep up with the up coming draft. Good Job and Good Luck. Cheers
I think your site is a very good start, you've got the content layed out pretty well. I have a few design comments though - For your header, I would colorize the photographs to all blue so there aren't "too many colors" on the header.. - And for your bars, I would keep them all orange instead of different colors