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allgeek.com please review

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trevorhoare

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Looking for some constructive criticism of allgeek.com
Just got started out and really just playing around with it right now. Don't be afraid to hurt my feelings

http://allgeek.com
 
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amplify

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Don't like the logo and scrolling header.

Like that it's responsive, but dislike it not being mobile friendly.

Needs more content to stand out and better design.
 

trevorhoare

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Thank you, I was kinda wondering about the scrolling header too. It's a little annoying I think.. like it gets in the way.
I like the logo a lot. What do other people think?
Content is coming, but I really just started so that will be filled in soon.

Anyone else care to comment?
 

Nomzo

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Hi Trevor,

The colour and shape (it's like a call-to-action button) of the internal search is very distracting, especially the contrast against the clean minimal white background. It's probably worth having a think what you want people to focus attention on when they land on the Homepage.

e.g.

If indeed you want users to search, then centralising the search bar and making it more of a feature, similar to YouTube, might work.

If you want people to view the stories / news, then those should be the main visual draws (colour).

If you want people to register, then draw the eye to this and highlight the benefits of registering.

Nice site, nice concept - hope it takes off!
 

trevorhoare

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Thank you Nomzo. I fixed the search box and I think it looks way better. Was wondering if I should put some kind of subtle background image behind the main news section.. like some stripes or something.....
 

trevorhoare

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I got rid of the scrolling header like David Walker suggested and I think it works better now.
 
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amplify

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When I initially posted, I was on an Android Phone with a 4.7" screen. It wasn't mobile friendly and would keep refreshing content and the image (a description I believe then image). Not mobile friendly at all for that.

Looking at it on a PC it looks a lot better. However, I would rearrange your menu where Submit, Register and Login are all together.

In fact, I would put them all in 1 group as a form to entice people to login/register by having a Username/Password [Login] and below it in small text "Forgot Password? Register" links below it. Of course, I would put this in the top right of the page as collecting members and essentially building a list that you can email targeted updates to do what YouTube does (track for instance if they look at the WTF category more than Beer and send a weekly email "What's new on AllGeek.com with 'WTF' as opposed to 'Beer' to get relevant traffic all the time and keep an active user base). Putting it in the top right sets focus that this is your main objective, which it should. It will be your "Call to Action" so to speak, even WhiteHouse.gov uses it (though to the left, but with the picture that they flipped from Obama looking at the CTA makes it fit, however most if not all people tend to look at the top right).

Additionally, implementing Facebook Connect and placing it just right can convert a lot more users as well.

If you do that, you should remove "Login/Signup from the menu".

Search should be removed from the Menu and placed right of the breadcrums with the option to do an advanced search first followed by regular search box before "Sort Posts". All searches should be tracked and added to a database for what each member is searching for. It'll also give you relevant data in the future to send weekly updates (more on this as well below).

I would also consider making the menu more appealing where you can tell that they're links by making them stand out somehow with a new color on hover or a new color and separate them completely with images or fancier CSS.

Another thing I dislike is that the "featured post" widget isn't the same size all the way across in blocks. It makes the left, right, etc. all have different heights which is kinda distracting and may give favor to one website over the other as it's larger. In the future, you can consider monetizing this site by having a website's background a different color that stands out from the rest, a monthly paid subscription perhaps, since you don't have any form of monetizing the site at the moment by its appearance.

I would also scoot your logo all the way to the left and add "Follow" and "Share" to the main menu. These would be drop down boxes. Follow would link to your sites' Twitter, Facebook, etc. and Share would be clickable links to share your site on various platforms.

Removing "More" and changing "Groups" to "Users" would give you more flexibility and room as well. Under this new menu you could include "Top Users", "Live Updates" and "Tag Cloud" and move "RSS" and "RSS Feeds" under the new "Follow" menu.

If you look at your sub menu, these are categories. I would refine them to be drop down as well as they are broad 'geek' terms and there are a lot that can fall under them. For instance "Gaming" can be broken up into "Consoles", "PC", etc. with sub menus of that for popular games. This will give you a better sense of how users will submit content and how it can be administered and moved to get targeting right on.

If you want to get serious about this site, I would suggest http://www.crazyegg.com/ - This will put a "heat map" on your site where you can see what visitors click most and where their mouse position is along as where you lose the visitor (1/2 way down the page or do they go all the way to the bottom). Unfortunately, Google Analytics doesn't have this feature at the time and this is a paid product, but will pay off once you arrange everything correctly and keep making modifications to the website. I would suggest starting off at the $9/mo package as it tracks 10,000 PAGEVIEWS (not unique visitors) and ensure in your coding that the tracking code is not displayed to spiders (they will suck the page views up). You will never get it 100%, but you will know what users want most and be able to set focus to them more as time goes on.

Lot of other stuff I could change or criticize as well, but time is money. If you like any of these ideas and implement them, I'd be more than glad to check it over again. A lot of these are already proven strategies to convert a visitor to a user and make money. :)
 
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trevorhoare

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Wow, that's a lot of great advice. Thank you! I'm going to go through this and start implementing your suggestions. :)
 

Tia Wood

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Logo is so tiny.

Don't like the dull grey mouseovers. And there are three colors styles happening in the header: the blue logo, dull grey mouseovers and red background in the sub menus. Plus a blue button for 'go'.

At first glance the homepage looks so crowded and I don't know where to focus my attention. I think if you make those thumbnails bigger into rows of three and get rid of the text underneath it should clean it up a bit. You could have the text underneath come up on mouseover.

Sub page:

the text on the right side is tiny. (Newest Member, Total members, etc chart)
 

Theo

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I agree, the logo is too small to show its potential. Since the focus is the content, the nav bar is of secondary importance but it could use some contrast in the hue, e.g. blue/gray/white.
 

trevorhoare

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Lots of good suggestions here. I increased the size of the thumbnails and changes the text to a mouseover as Tia Wood suggested, and I think it came out nice. What ya think?
 

amplify

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I like it a lot better like that, but you may need to add a side column. This could be where your calendar could be along with categories and potential advertisers as well. Adding a sidebar will decrease the image size, but I think that's somewhat necessary as you have it set for 426x320 (almost as wide as a banner advertisement).

I can't speak for Tia when she said make the description show when it's hovered over, but I don't believe she meant adding a title attribute. I believe she may have implied having the same effect you have for voting added at the very bottom with a snippet of the actual description (similar to how sliders are).

Ex for small-circle-jujitsu-wikipedia-the-free-encyclopedia page:
Instead of "Small Circle JuJitsu - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia" have it display maybe 50-100 characters with "Read More" text at the bottom of the image of something such as, "Small Circle JuJitsu is a style of jujutsu developed by Wally Jay that focuses on smooth transitions. [Read More]" that fades in or scrolls up (some effect to it).

Edit: My bad, was reading Chrome wrong (still getting used to this after my expensive-forceful IE 10 incident), it's 382x287, but IMO still a bit large.
 
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