Please Review my Niche

Hi Plazza,

Thanks for your feedback on netsperience 2.x - I figured I would reciprocate

I do not know much about the mining industry, however the site looks like a good portal with a lot of information.

I am surprised you offer the choice of themes, given the subject matter. One suggestion would be using a thumbnail of the theme as the image selector. Also, when offering so many variations, it is near impossible to optimize the display for all. I would reduce it to perhaps three choices for theme, font etc.

Overall, a good-looking and well-organized site. Bravo!

The overall layout is pretty good. I like the navigation and the look & feel. The content area is kind of schizophrenic. There's a lot going on there and it can be hard to focus. What you should do is clear this of anything that's not really necessary. Then take a hard look at the content: does this show the user what they can find on the site? Does it entice them to look further?

Most of the content on the home page is really about the site itself. Repetition of what you are offering (snoooze). People often don't read much online, they're looking for the action. Take, for example, the jobs tab. Instead of saying that you have jobs, why not bring up some recent job listings?

I agree with decibel.places that the theme changing is kind of strange. I really don't think that's necessary for a site like this.

I'm also noticing some display problems in Opera 9.5/Linux. The "More sites" on the navigation menu bumps onto a second line. The border to the right of the left navigation menu is overlapped by the tabbed boxes in the centre area.

The header grahpic is incoherent as well. There seems to be no rationale as to why the text was placed the way it was. The font looks like plain olde Times New Roman to me. The "Mining" header in gold is hard to read against the background. Really, all you need here is "Mining Plazza: Human edited mining information" or something like that. Everything else is redundant.

hi i like you website but think about the middle body part you can do more better ...

Thanks for the comments guys they have been taken into account. I will revamp the mining directory.

The overall look and feel is rather present. However there are certain lil nitty grittys that could be tidied up to give it a more professional finish.

1) The color theme does not seem to be consistent in the pages and across the site.
a) Particularly in the highlighted words in Red and Blue (in Free Offers) "MINING PLAZZA(Red) FREE OFFERS(Blue)"
b) The tabbed windows in the Home page all have different colored tabs - again Consistency would help.

2) Text columns on the bottom of the homepage seem really tight. Needs more whitespace - especially needs padding around the images. I would suggest perhaps getting the text to move below the images for the articles in the 2 columns.

3) I think your use of the blue color for your highlights is confusing for the user as I am tempted to click on it thinking these are links. I would really recommend adding some type of CSS to the tag that would not require you to mouseover before you figure out its a link e.g. "Mining Equipment For Sale Search Add Entry" links on each listing page

4) the colorful icons on the top of the page are ineffective as they look like they are part of a banner ad - these should have a look similar to the rest of the site. Also, having 2 levels of main nav like that can often be confusing too.

5) A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z | 0-9 on most listing pages should be sized to fit neatly on 1 line.

6) Looking at a sample listing for Ultrasonics Eco Cleaning Solutions, noticed that it has a completely different look once again. Work required to better integrate the listings.

7) Agree that theme changing is unneccessary.

Hope that helps.

The site is well organized. But at the same time it's incredibly cluttered (this is applied towards the front page only, interior pages have many more problems). I have to state the obvious first. You should use larger margins/padding, along with better fonts. Try separating segments with background color as well. The devil is in the details with this layout, work on those things and let me know, I'd like to see the difference.

This is a good reference: http://www.brightcove.com/solutions/

HTH