SITE REVIEW: Maxedge (Different) Update #2

Maxedge

My previous "Maxedge" was a web designs site but this is a more personal works site shared with a friend.

Could you tell me what you like adn dislike?

Even more helpful if you could tell me specifics on what you think about the color usage, layout, navigation etc.
Thanks in advance!

maybe a link?


http://www.maxedge.net/

Nice code, Rtm probably would like this and your "divs"


Nice layout, altho, sometimes,
what is the point of your site though, it confuses me:/

I'll provide an "about" page soon. It's jsut me and a friend and our personal interests. Articles, rants, blogs, art (drawing and writing), etc.

I really like it. The logo is nice, good colors and nice buttons.

good job!

Well, it might not mean much from the new guy (my first post) but here's my feedback...

I like the site layout - sharp. Can't tell what the site is, however - sorta vague - no "welcome to the corner of my brain" statement or anything...

I like the logo M thing... could be given personality in Flash - it'd be fun, I'd make him take a nap or walk onto the page or something...

I don't care for the little dude in the suit - personal pref

You did a good job of make the layout look good with minimal bandwidth.

BTW - I'm Chris

Hi Skybin. Visually I love your site. Nice use of colors, layout... very clean and pleasing to the eye. May I ask what software/techniques you used to create your logo?

I'm only new at this html thing so I'll leave the code to others to review. Once you add (like others have said before me) something out the site content/purpose you are pretty much there.

Great work, keep it up!

The site does indeed have a clean feel. I love the logo, great job with that.

The color scheme I find to be a bit microsoft-ish...I don't know why I feel that way, perhaps I spend too much time with bCentral...

Your code for the most part is also pretty clean, however, there is no attention to any SEO whatsoever and I notice the head tag doesn't seem to close anywhere.

Pardon, SEO? Thanks for pointint out the missing closing tag.

Lionking, for the graphics I extensively and only used photoshop and a digital camera. For the code, I just used a text editor I.E. Editplus which I think is the greatest text editor in the world. I wrote the stuff out one piece by one piece . Wrote, saved, and viewd on my machine via an Apache/php/mysql setup. I do the minor revisions on my machien then when a significant amount has been changed or I'm done, I upload the file.

Ok, also added an About.

nice design. great logo.

im used to seeing side-menus extending right to the bottom though - it creates a symettry within a site which is good.

Search Engine Optimization. When a search engine spiders your website or if you intend on submitting your site - you need the proper SEO (particularly meta tags) so the search engines can index your site correctly.

It depends of course on the amount of traffic you intend on having - but then, I find that now-a-days SEO is being considered everywhere and for everyone - at least to the point where meta tags are used.

Just a thought.

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

i like your drawings very beatnick-ish

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. Having a meaningful heading structure with useful; relevant headings helps with Google; they weight h1 elements with high importance. Meta elements with keywords and descriptions are more useful for in-site searches, in my opinion. Undoubtedly the most important method of search engine optimization, though, is making the Web site popular, and that can only be done through content.

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).