After not taking care of the page since april, i relaunched it a couple of days ago: http://www.gadgets-news.com I am using adsense, chitika and kontera (and a snap plugin).... I know that there are quite some Gadgets pages out there but i am focusing on video content... Thats why i am also using the vodpod block on top of the page. Please let me know what you think about it.
too many posts on one page, hard to find navigation menu (really small inbetween really large ads) also, dislike that your menubar jumps up a bit above your header and is not aligned
thanks a lot for your feedback Lordy. I will change it to a maximum of 10 or 15 posts i think. you mean the videoblock is not aligned or the right navigation?
i am using firefox and your videoblock at the bottom of your right search box (closed). and i agree with lordy, your navigation is hard to find.
Your page is 1.6 MEGS in 167 files - that is a real world minimum of 33 seconds just for the overhead of that many files on BROADBAND, much less the six minutes it would take for that page to load on dialup. You've got more ads showing than content - here's a hint, if the user isn't clicking on three adverts, they arent going to click on thirty... They layout should probably also adjust for people with adblocks since under Opera all I see is a vast expanse of whiteness... Especially when that's 158k in 22 scripts powering it - bloat from hell that's more likely to drive visitors away than keep them. The 'gadgets news' box floating to cover up those video links doesn't seem all that well thought out... The giant images for each news item seem out of place and are directly responsable for the page bloat. I'd strip those down to say... 192x144 thumbs (or even smaller) that launch the 'larger view'... bringing the content of the article up into line with the picture instead of having it pushed down so you have to scroll a page and a half just to reach it. The total lack of boxes or dividers between articles makes it nigh impossible to tell where one begins and another ends apart from the giant images, and even then it gets confusing as to if it's an article or an advertisement. And like most turdpress templates you've got 69k of HTML and 14k of stylesheet doing what should only need half that or less. Land sakes you've only got 28k of content - 69k of HTML should be throwing up a huge warning sign. The real kicker is the 113 images totalling 800 MEGS - sweet jesus that's freaking huge... Worse, MOST of those images aren't even hosted off the same server, doubling or even tripling the handshake times to get those files. It needs a LOT of image optimization, image reduction, code reduction, etc, etc, etc.
thanks a lot for this detailed feedback i totally agree in many points but to be honest i never thought about dialup users and even though i will change the picture sizes and add some boxes and dividers i don't think that it makes sense anymore to take care of any 56k modem user.. otherwise sites like youtubes wouldnt exist but thank you so much for this awesome feedback, i am taking care of it asap and will come back when i fixed the main issues.
Still >20% of the US connected public, and in some states (colorado, the dakota's) that number is 100%... it's not economically viable for broadband providers to spend a half billion bucks on a thousand miles of cable to pick up 500-1000 users. Actually, that's a VERY good site to look at - for all it's flash and images, the entire page is usually well under 200k and about 40-60 files. While slow for dialup users, it's still accessable and quite usable. (you just get more buffering when loading videos). Just ask Dan Shulz about that one - he's on dialup 5 says of the week at home because it's the only financially viable connection in his area (even 128k DSL in his parts is close to 100/mo, and that's in a chicago suburb!!!) - yet he still browses youtube from time to time. Another thing to remember is that 'dialup' speeds aren't just isolated to dialup users. Broadband users sharing a connection at work or even at home could be choked down to 56k or even slower by coworkers hogging the connection... kids gaming in the next room. I know when my roommate is playing Final Fantasy XI my connection speed goes to ****, and likewise he gets choked down when I start up uTorrent. One final point - hosting costs and server load - the more handshakes the more IOWAIT you'll see on the server... the larger the files the longer your connection is busy serving one person... You're sending the full images on each unique first-visit, even on day later repeat customers... that's just wasted bandwidth... It can be the difference between 20 uniques a minute choking a dual Xeon 3.0 ghz to death, and 500 uniques a minute running comfortably on a P4 2ghz. ... and some hosts will even kick you off if your site chews too much cpu/connect time even if you are well under the bandwidth they allocated or you prepaid.
thank you so much for the great feedback but i have to admit.... i changed the layout, even though it's not finalized right now: http://www.gadgets-news.com/ my gf and me had some serious discussions going on and due to the fact that she is taking care of most of the content.... well guys you know, sometimes you just have to agree and give up argueing.. please let me know your thoughts about the new template
yes its a standard one but i am going to tweak it some more... especially the newsbox in the middle... i think it would make sense to have a single box for each news.
ok i just made some more changes... the adsense links and text are now black and i changed the name of the boxes that contain these ads.... i also seperated the single news a little bit more, so that the users can see when one newsitem ends and the other starts. http://www.gadgets-news.com Please let me know what you think about it.
ok, the new one look better. clean theme, maybe you want to consider a read more link to cut the content.