SITE REVIEW: Xona.com

Please review my website:

http://xona.com/

do you really need the Google ads? if you must keep them do, but otherwise dump em!

spice it up, add some pics in the layout, soften it up with rounder edges, everything is soo... square!

nice menu! very nice - um why are there 2 of them? pick one (I like the top one) and take the other one out! if you need the options, then put em in a drop down!

overall the site is nice, well organised and clean, needs some spice and menu reorganisation... 6/10 for looks but 8.5/10 for content. I also like the idea, very original, that counts for something, so my final overall score is 8/10 for the reasons listed above.

You have several fonts going there. Might want to pick just 1. Header, google ad, left menu, main content, all different.

Thanks for the analysis. These are things that are hard for me to see, as I look at it everyday and see what I expect and expect what I see.

Different fonts: I wanted the Georgia font for the main content (as I find it easier to read) and I wanted a simple sans-serif font like Arial for the menus. But now I see i am using Verdana for the side menus. I'll try to fix this. UPDATE: FONTS FIXED: I have used arial everywhere except for the main content of the page, which is georgia. So the logo, titles, menus, etc., are all arial. The main content is georgia.

Two menus: The top horizontal menu was supposed to have the main selections only, but as I have been adapting the side menu, the main menu has become more and more irrelevant. Good catch. I was kind of suspecting this would be said. But, again, it's easy to be blind when you are the designer and user since day 1. I will remove the top menu. I honestly found the top menu to be difficult to read anyway. UPDATE: TOP MENU REMOVED! Wow, it looks much cleaner, and it is nice to know that everything's in once place, the side menu.

I removed the top menu instead of the side menu, as I want all the options to be shown. A drop down top menu would be cleaner than the long side menu, but I am not sure how to do that yet. I do know that drop down menus can be constructed via css, so I am considering it.

Google Ads: They are paying my hosting bill right now. I will remove them once I have a product that sells (and hopefully makes money). Until then, I need them. The best I could do was to make sure my visitors knew they were ads, and not integrate them into the site so much to fool visitors into thinking they were products or services Xona.com offers.

Squareness: I'll have to think about this one. I'm not sure how to do it. I'll take a look at some 'non-square' sites and try to come up with ideas. If you have any examples, please share!

HUGE Xona.com title: Even though no one mentioned it, I put my logo so huge so that people will remember it, as our site is new. There's no question that if you stumble back to our site for a second time, you will remember it somewhat. Eventually it will get smaller and smaller...

Thanks for the compliments, too!

I made a few updates, noted in the above post.

nice clean up job, but I still think that you should spice it up.. add some sort of a background to something, just make the site a little more interessting overall! maybe round off the edges instead of square corners... (little gifs can be placed in all 4 corners of any DIV or TABLE in order to accomplish this.) make the titles more interessting by having a swirl around them... I dont know what, but this site just missing a little excitment I think. however I would now rate the site at 8.5/10 so you did go up .5, but if you wanna hit 9 or 9.5 try the stuff I just said... I can help you too if you want.. (PM me if you want help)

Phil, thanks for the offer to help. If you could point me to any website tutorial or website that has the ideas you speak of, that would be great for now. I wouldn't mind spicing up the site, as long as the look remains very simple and clear, which I think is what you have in mind.

Phil and others,

One other reason I purposely kept my site clean (not spiced up), was to maximize browser compatibility and download speed (for dialups and impatient users). But when I compare it to other sites, it can seem lacking.

Putting curvy graphics (in the corner of tables, etc.) can look amazing, but how compatible is this sort of thing?

Hmmmm...

I would have to agree with what the others have said..

Youneed to spice it up abit, because to be quite frank, its a tad boring.. To much text, and it doesnt really give me a reason to stay there..

I get that you are trying to keep DL time minimal, etc.. but.. its too bare..

I think you also need to bring the side menus in abit..

putting a small gif in the corner in order to create a "curvy" box instead of a "square" box (of divs or of a table) works in any browser that supports either divs or tables, whichever solution you choose to go with. here's how it works in amazing ASCII art.

in a table:
---------------------
|1| 2 |3|
---------------------
| | | |
| | | |
|4| 5 |6|
| | | |
| | | |
---------------------
|7| 8 |9|
---------------------
as you can see it would just be making 3 rows and 3 collums and having rounded gifs in cells 1, 3, 7 and 9.

with divs:

---------------------
|2| |3|
---- ----
| |
| |
| 4 | <--1
| |
| |
---- ----
|5| |6|
---------------------

and here as you can see there would be a big div (1) in which 5 others would be placed using CSS layout. cells, 2, 3, 5 and 6 would be the rounded gifs.

Nice website I think !

I redesigned my site, so I thought I would bump this thread:
http://xona.com/

I tried to make the site as clean as possible, removing all unnecessary clutter. If there is any more clutter I should remove (besides the ads, unfortunately), please let me know!

I would definitely recommend you add some more style to a:hover, instead of from blue to red. and maybe use a better font for the body, like verdana or something.

What kind of styles for a:hover were you thinking of? A different background color perhaps?

I think there is too my text... but I don't know how to add graphics in the mix to make it look better. Maybe what I need to do is get rid of a lot of the text, which is always hard to do because you have to cut things out.