SITE REVIEW: Maxedge (Different) Update #2

Are my meta tags incorrect or something? I have an language declaration, keywords, and description tags.. Is something missing?

Search engines like Google, in terms of pagerank, don't particularly pay attention to the content of meta elements like keywords or description, because much more useful information is to be found in the content of the page itself, and people abuse keywords

Now I will critique everything that I can find to critique:

The first thing that I want to know, upon visiting, is what your site is about. Upon arrival at index2.php, I get the impression that your site is about news. News of what? I don't know. Really, I have no clue what your site is about. I know that the title is "Maxedge" and I see the word News in the title; I see "newsunbiased reality", and I see a bar with "Newsfeed" heading the top of it. So I think your site is about providing a News service, pointing to articles of interest. But actually, the starting page just contains news about the Web site itself. You need some way of telling the visitors what your site has to offer; they will come with short attention spans on their first visits, and they would like to know this right away.

A major usability problem that many Web sites have is pages which link to themselves. When a visitor clicks a self-referencing link, nothing will happen, or the page will reload. When things are the same, the unsavvy visitor will thing something went wrong and may try to click it again. The savvy ones will notice in the status bar that the link points nowhere. And if the link points nowhere, it's useless! So you should unlink all self-referencing links. For instance, on your index2.php page, you have News (arrow) Site News, both of which point to the current document.

At the bottom of your document you have an interesting copyright statement: "Copyright Maxedge.net and Charles Hwang. All Rights Reserved. 2002-2004" What exactly is Maxedge.net? The name of a corporation? The name of a small business? If Maxedge.net is merely the server name and is not the title of any legal entity, having copyright attributed to Maxedge.net is a bit nonsensical.

Your "The Arts" page has some issues with its menu at the top right. As far as that menu goes: As I mentioned earlier, I do not believe in self-referincing hyperlinks. If you had a black (and possibly bolded) version of each link for the top-right menu, you could have the black version being not hyperlinked in the top right menu, representing the person's current location within the site. Knowing one's location is helps the user navigate (especially if the site grows. At its present size the structure of the site is very easy and simple). Incidentally, on your "The Arts" page, your "News (arrow) The Arts" has "The Arts" linked to itself too.

I am not sure what "unbiased reality" means. Nobody is unbiased. Ever. Never mind this, though; you might have philosophical differences with me on this one.

In your "navlog" div (with News (arrow) Site News), the arrow is _way_ bigger than the text; it looks rather out of place. I would suggest using something as simple as a solidus, like, "News // Site News". Or a hyphen, an em dash (—), etc. This is guaranteed not to look out of place with the font size.

As far as dates go... It is a good idea to use a more explicit method of listing dates. Does 03.04.2004 refer to March fourth or April third? Whereas say, 2004.03.04 unquestionably refers to March fourth, and it looks so much cooler because dates like those can be sorted . It is more similar to the ISO standard which uses 2004-03-04.


Now I will look at your code.

In many cases you have redundancies; you seem to be afraid of using CSS on any elements which are not SPAN or DIV. For instance, you have things like the following:

... in which the div and span elements were unnecessary; you could have just used CSS on the H2 and H1 elements.

Your images need alt attributes with text that can stand in if the image is not loaded.

It is not logical to have an H5 marking up the Aristotlian quotation - with regard to the semantic meaning of what headings are. It is a minor issue that only people like me would care about, but it would be more logical to put a div around it. Actually, you already did put a div around it, inside of which you put the H5. Just add a one or two styling rules to the paddingh class and you can omit the H5.

Also, you have XML-style tag endings for various meta elements and such in the heading. Since you're not using XHTML, the / at the end of the meta and link tags shouldn't be there.

You say in a post that you have a language declaration, but I do not see one. I would turn <html> into <html lang="en"> to add that.

That's all the negative thoughts I could muster. Only twelve of them. Which is a very low number. I like much of your design and layout: It is simple and readable, and it augments the importance of the content rather than diminishing it. I like the presence of the dark background on the headings in the Newsfeed column. Everything else - the color scheme and such, I like.

You can make double-quotation marks look better by using &ldquo; and &rdquo;, or better yet, the numerical equivalents (which I do not remember off the top of my head).

like the colours, and the mosaik look of the head banner thinger. the logo is nice, sharp, only comment ill say i didnt see above is that the footer bar looks out of place when viewed with the sidebar. maybe put a border around it? also, in firefox, theres a good 3-4 cm of empty space between the content and the footer.