SITE REVIEW: Majd-GFX tutorials

Heh, finally got 3 posts to post here

http://www.majd-gfx.com

what do you guys think?

also, if anyone would like to link back please don't hesitate. Also, Majd-GFX is accepting tutorials if you would like to post your's on Majd-GFX.



Thank you

You may want to start archiving your updates, its a pretty long scroll down for my taste. Also your date format changed at the end (5/12/2004 -> 12/1/2004), make sure to keep it standard in future update posts. The generic <hr> that use doesnt fit too well, create a spacer image, maybe a white color, and use that instead. Overall, there's something about the colors that just doesnt feel right, there's a lot of grey, a lot of dark and not a lot of stand out colors. I think you should try and incorporate white text or something to to balance the site out. Also, I think your menu would come off a lot better if you used some flash or rollover images, it just seems plain.

The tutorials page is waaaaaaaaaaaaaay to busy. Its "organized" but the different colors are too distracting and make your eyes wander all over the place. If you want to have 3 columns for the 3 sections, make them each similar fonts and colors and just put a simple horizontal spacer in between to separate them. Also, the CSS image doesnt fit and doesnt look very sharp.

The script section was pretty good, but may I suggest making the very top row of the table, with all the column titles, a different background color and font than the rest of the cells in the table. Just so it stands out from the rest.

The message board/forum colors are like BAM! It looks like your just starting to work on it, but make sure that its easy to navigate. As is stands, I dont know where to look first.

Last comment, on the Links page, the boarders around the images and very blah. I think you should take it off, it takes the appeal away from the image tags.

I'll just remark that if you want to run one of the best tutorial sites, take a look at other sites that offer the same service. You have to put more than a lot of focus on navigation and layout/color scheme. If someone is going to spend 15-20+ mins reading something off of your site, you want to make it easy on their eyes, easy to find other articles, easy to get around. Which reminds me, a great addition to your site would be a search feature, to search for specific tutorial. You're definitely on your way and you have the right ideas, you just have to shape them properly.

Oh wow, no one has really critiqued my site like that, and I love it. Thank you very much. I am just starting out with all the small details of building a website that I have never even knew about like alignment and color choice (never knew how important that is) also, I am coding a search function right now as a matter of fact. I realise the tutorial section needs a lot of work.


Overall, i love your style of critiquing, thank you and i will consider all your suggestions.


p.s. do you know any good tutorials about making you'r site "easier on the eyes"

very nice site.. I don't have too much to add on to the above post but, i'd request that you do not publicly display the address of your visitors.. it's typically not something people like to see online.

EDIT:
oh yeah, and I really like the way you've incorporated the google ads, they're tasteful.. blend in nicely with the site.

heh, thanks actually i had that idea before, i don't know why i never did anything about it, i'll fix it right now thank you

You really should put an intro paragraph on your main page. At first glance I have no idea what your site is about. I see you followed daremedy's advice about the updates, your concept is good where the user gets to choose how many entries to display but I thik you should list the latest one to default to display and then put a link at the end of that entry to view previous or view next or something like that. That way when you first come across the site it doesn't look so empty or that content has been forgotten.

Your tutorials section definitely needs to be worked on. The layout format is not very effective.

Your forums title is different than your main site, it's confusing

Remove the border around your hyperlinked images in your links section, also resize all your links images to same size, image links like you have usually are set at 88x31.

yeah i am almost done reformatting my tutorials page, i hope this new one is better.

Also, the forum was at the default skin, i am almost done changing that too.

Looks pretty alright. The layout is good!
Just dont like the top banner with yr site name in it.
its too blur. (not my fav)

I havent really come across a site that explains how to make a website easier on the eyes, most of that comes from user reviews, like what you get from this forum. But generally speaking, you want to make tutorial titles stand out and the content easy to read. I'll give you a few examples of some sites that bring out the tutorial layout concept perfectly, the best site of course being http://www.w3schools.com/. But take a look at these other sites and see if you can point out how they stand out, how they format their layout and make it easy to hop all over the site with ease.

http://www.extropia.com/tutorials.html
http://www.echoecho.com/school.htm
http://www.wdvl.com/Authoring/Tutorials/

Thnx for the input guys, what do you think of the site now? i changed a whole lotta stuff with it and there's a lot more to come

The updates on the index page are way off line, they appear at the very bottom and it adds to the length of your page, I'm not sure what happened there. Align it back to the top. I like the idea of selecting the number of updates to display. Other than that, I'll just comment that the tutorial section is roughly 100 times better that it was before! It has a lot more shape to it. The photoshop selections though are out of line, it looks like you're displaying the "No tutorials available" on top of the heading, it should be below. Also, put some titles above the columns, I'm not too sure what the numbers stand for next to the author. Big improvements though, keep it up.

under name of site there is an &nbsp; showing . Also, I don't know if it's in your style or what, but, the height of the main table should change to the smallest possible for number of entries, not just stay so large.. The way I'm looking at the page, i'm assuming that there is a large amount of calling to at least one database and numerous other things depending on how it was set up. Seems fine right now but, make sure everything is optimized for when the site gets bigger / more popular.

EDIT:

if your site gets any number of visitors, the link to http://www.majd-gfx.com/all_comments.php will have to go completely or by default limit to a certain number of comments. otherwise, the amount of data on that page would be huge if your site gets any semblance of popularity.

theres a table row issue somewhere...i get the main body of the page halfway down the screen after having scrolled two screen lengths...???

darkermoon: yeah the all_comments page will have "Previous 2,3,4,5,6 Next" style navigation when there are more then 15 entries.

Also, i had it setup before where both divs would stretch only as much as the content, but that looked just plain ugly, so i made it how it is. Also, im going to be making it just a bit more graphical (As you might have noticed I have already done that in the tutorials page.

ramone_johnny: yeah i realize there's something wrong with the css, the site looks perfect in Firefox, I am working on the issue right now. Thanks for notifying me.

Thanks for the comments guys I really appreciate all the constructive criticism.

despite all your work on the site, I would have one complaint that I just can't get over and that is the fact that even the most basic of your tutorials (CSS) are from another site. I might also say that you should consider the security of your own site before you try and teach security. I have to say, I like the site but people always appreciate original content rather than items taken from other sites even with permission. Once again, it's a good start but, could use some work. The internet explorer problem really needs to be fixed, it's very hindering for the visitors. I hope you take this as constructive criticism and not in a negative way.
-Garrett