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1. meteorit
   Member
   Posted 1 year ago #

   I'm looking for constructive criticism of my gadget blog:

   http://www.machinesthatgobing.com

   I'm interested in your comments regarding any of the following:

   • Overall Design
   • Use of Colors and Graphics
   • Navigation
   • SEO
   • Use of WordPress Features, Tools, and Plugins
   • General experience

   Not so interested in code validation as it's already been tested. (though if I add a new plugin something could be screwed up for a short time until I spot it and fix it)

   If anything needs clarification drop a comment on this page or contact me through the site contact form:

   http://www.machinesthatgobing.com/contact-us/

   GO ON BE BRUTAL, YOU KNOW YOU WANT TO!

   Thanks

2. moshu
   Member
   Posted 1 year ago #

   Very slow and very long main page.

3. marjiec
   Member
   Posted 1 year ago #

   Hi,
   It is slow to load in the right side bar.
   There seems to be a css problem between the sneeze and read-more rules. They are overlapping.
   Did you intend to have artifacts in the header logo?

4. meteorit
   Member
   Posted 1 year ago #

   Thanks, Moshu and Marjiec,

   I've reduced the index page from listing 15 posts to 7.

   The css problem seems to be in the Chitika ads — I'm looking into this.

   Thanks again.

5. Otto42
   Moderator
   Posted 1 year ago #

   There's a bunch of weird question marks in your sidebar, around the feed/comments links.

   The ?'s are in the source too:

   <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/MachinesThatGoBing" title="Subscribe to my feed" rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml"><img id="rssimage" src="/wpadditionalfiles/rssdice.jpg" alt="RSS logo on orange dice" />
 <img src="/wpadditionalfiles/feed.gif" class="rsstitles" alt="feed" />
 </a>
 <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/MachinesThatGoBingComments" title="Subscribe to my comments" rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml"><img src="/wpadditionalfiles/comments.gif" class="rsstitles" alt="comments" /></a>


   If you're going to have a picture like that in every blog entry, I'd go from 7 posts down to 5 or even 4. Too many big pictures on the front page.

   The older posts navigation seems to be broken, I get "Page 1 of 0" on the bottom.

   Add Page navigation to the top of the page somewhere too. Maybe that double bar with the search box in the middle... Older and newer posts links on either side of that would make some sense.

   Also, javascript to load a flash object to show a non-moving image? On every post? Are you freakin' kidding me? Okay, yeah, it's small and it caches, but really, it seems like major overkill. You'd be better off manually making the images using a decent image editor and a macro to do the heavy lifting. Key to a good site: Keep it lightweight. It's easy to go overboard with fancy stuff, but it's the words and the content that draws people in. The fancy stuff just causes problems.

6. nark3d
   Member
   Posted 1 year ago #

   It's only valid transitional, I'd work towards Strict if you can. Also, as others have mentioned, the page is 319kb and some of the image work is a bit pixelated.

7. Kalessin
   Member
   Posted 1 year ago #

   The header image suffers horribly from JPEG compression artifacts, and isn't quite lined up properly, if you look at the border on the left just below the image.

8. meteorit
   Member
   Posted 1 year ago #

   @Otto42,

   The weird question-marks were an encoding issue which I have resolved.

   I've fixed the 'older posts' issue — apparently it was being screwed up by the 'Adhesive' plugin — it's been disabled.

   The Flash image replacement system I'm using is rather tedious and I appreciate the timing issues it raises. I'll be replacing this with Photoshop script-generated images in the near future.

   @nark3d and @Kalessin,

   I've replaced the header image with a higher quality version and sorted out the alignment problem (on my browsers anyway!)

   Thanks for the feedback

9. pus2meong
   Member
   Posted 1 year ago #

   too many ads....

10. flynntastic
    Member
    Posted 1 year ago #

    Ditto on the ads, its a bit overwhelming.

11. gopackin
    Member
    Posted 1 year ago #

    Ads are pretty overwhelming - I know you're trying to make some dough off of this site, but you should definitely consider look at some alternative, less in-your-face methods of placing AdWords.

    The shadow on the upper beveled edges is too light, and doesn't match the shadow that's repeating down the left & right sides of the body.

    The 'Search Other Products Without Leaving This Page' is a blatant lie. (Or it just doesn't work correctly.)
    
    I have a fervent contempt for YieldManager ads that's difficult to articulate - particularly because they do annoying crap like this:
    http://content.yieldmanager.edgesuite.net/6105/82999/971225828445306a8ddc48.gif

    And last, the 'Impact' font is an insult to good design, right up there with fonts like 'Chicago', 'Comic Sans', and 'Papyrus' - If you're going to use sIFR to replace headlines, at least use something decent like Franklin Gothic Heavy.

    If you're not up on paying for fonts, Josef Pro and Old Sans Black are two rather decent freebie alternatives.

    There's your "brutal" honesty for the day - All the best to you, and keep up the good work!

12. cstina
    Member
    Posted 1 year ago #

    Since you use a lot of images... you might want to consider adding "Post-Thumb Revisited."

    http://www.alakhnor.com/post-thumb/

    That way, you wouldn't have to post such large images (potentially slowing load time), but the user could just click and enlarge it "on demand."

13. 7milesdown
    Member
    Posted 1 year ago #

    Too many ads! It hurts!

14. ub.fred
    Member
    Posted 1 year ago #

    Well, i can be brutal, yet i'll try my best to be constructive!

    Bad Stuff:
    - Bad color choices, we see those in almost every search service around that it's boring, i get the theme is an adsense one, but really... they're boring.
    - The big gray border/big gray shadow are not looking good... and it is bad aligned on upper corner.
    - Except from the iPhone, The gadgets in your header are not very good quality, weird beast next to it screams 'I'm looking awful and i don't care'.
    - As said before, impact font is almost rude to the eye.
    - Way too many google ads...

    The good part is you wanted us to tell u the issues :)
    I don't know man but I think you should start all over again, i don't think there's much to loose here.

    Keep up!
    -fred

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