SITE REVIEW: Magazine on life in Qingdao

Hi all,

I am the webmaster of myredstar.com.cn

I am very busy keeping this monthly magazine online and also creating a business part so business can meet business / people here in Qingdao (China)

I'm also working on a forum (not published yet)

I don't use a cms yet (please advice) and i'm not a very experienced php programmer.

Any constrictive comments are very appreciated.

thanks

Frans

Nice! Can't say enough great things about the layout and graphics! The colors are exciting while not crossing the line into blaring, which is nice. Text links as well as graphic links, and all seemed to be grouped logically. The logo is simple, but great...very professional looking. And you seem to have tons of info for your target audience

The only thing I can see that I might change would be the shoutbox. I do understand the logic and need for it now, but your forum will most likely fill that need once you have it up and running. You could also install a pop-up chat instead once the forum goes live, to keep a shoutbox from mucking up the page.

Overall, though, wonderful!

really good site only bad thing was shout box, it was a bit confusing and i wouldn't have put it on the homepage, i would've made a seperate page for it so that it could maybe be made bigger but other than that it's a great site.

yeah I know, the frontpage layout needs to be redesigned, and the shout box will be gone once I got a good forum online.

thanx

Frans

Nice layout, design, color scheme, content. Easy navigation.

Grievance: Pop up on the hime page. Always annoying. And I could'nt figure out this particular one is a service from your site or an advertisement. I am not going to just dumbly download a desktop weather report without any information or credentials on the package.

Features, favorites, events, listings on the top do not look like buttons at all. I would have never imagined they have drop down menus unless the mouse accidentally touched one of them. They look like ordinary pictures and the titles are not at all indicative.

Overall, it looks good.

Pretty much a followthrough on what the other said. LOL I didnt know the top navigation was a navigation until I read quantums review! I think the layout is good. Its neat and proffesional. That shoutbox really has to go. It really ruins the the proffesionalism of the site. SOme discrepencies I found while looking through diferent browers:

1. while veiwing in Mozilla firefox, the red of the navigation and the red on the features image do not line up. Its only a couple pixels off, but its still noticable.

2. The scrollbar color code does not work in mozilla as well. The default scrollbar in the middle of your page (on the shoutbox) really makes it look bad.

3. You should insert a docType into your page code.

4. not sure what that means? but is it neccesary? nobody will see that unless they looked at the code, but it just seemed odd to me.

alrighty there may be a few more things in there, but I just ran over it quickly. Overall the site looks good, just needs a few touchups.