AndrewP — Sun, 10 Sep 2006 19:56:57 +0000

I like the site and think the overall layout is of a good standard. I can't see anything wrong with the site at all but as this is a website critique area I would just say that perhaps an opening paragraph or an opening couple of sentences would help to inform the visitor what you are all about.

When you read the text under the logo it pretty much explains it but it can still be a good idea to explain your websites purpose.

Ish — Sun, 10 Sep 2006 01:02:10 +0000

This is my first review and second post but here it goes

First navigating your site I thought the design looked very good and professional it was easy to know where I was going and I never got 'lost. I did experience errors will roaming the site though.

The page you are trying to access does not exist.
Please select a page from the main menu.

I encountered that while attempting to write a review and rate a component. Perhaps it won't allow me access because I am not a member? If so perhaps making it obvious that only members can use that function would be best.

In addition where your google ads are has been proven to be one of the worst places to locate ads...Sense people in the English language read left to right ads placed inside content or to the upper right and right sides of the page tend to get clicked the most.

Your site does have powerful competition though...PC world and Amazon aren't (imo) who you should worry about. Places like Hot Hardware and Tom's Hardware are the real competitors in the bleeding edge technology department. The fact though that all those reviews from different places are consolidated in one place is very cool though! I am unsure about the legality of that though...I would look into it if you aren't for sure. I say if you can get a good community and base you should go for it

~Ish (A personal user of your site)

Nomax5 — Fri, 08 Sep 2006 07:26:18 +0000

Hi Lost Hunter,

You site looks okay and works well, but I don’t see anything new, anything I can’t find on other sites.

I feel you need to do something different to stand out.

People aren’t always looking for the bleeding edge newest components as they tend to be more expensive and less reliable. Perhaps you could concentrate on that angle. the most reliable and best value stuff.

I personally like stuff I can drop without it breaking like military spec stuff, some people like blink flashy stuff, other prefer looks rather and functionality.

I think you should narrow your scope and concentrate in an area no one else is covering because you’re trying to compete with such as PC World and Amazon and I’m not confident you will win.

Hope this helps

Roy

restarted

Lost Hunter — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 22:35:56 +0000

Hi!

After more than 5 months there has been a lot of changes on the website and I would appreciate if you could review it again.

Thanks!

Review

Mrtoejam — Sun, 26 Mar 2006 19:50:21 +0000

This review is from a website more or less novice, I am not a designer but would like to give my view as an " outsider "
There is a hell of a lot of text and things going on on the front page that tended to have my eyes darting around ( if you know what I mean )
Would it be posssible to simplify any areas with drop downs or a slightly simpler layout?
I am sure you will recieve a lot more technical and in depth reviews than mine but best of luck.

I own a site which I am having problems with as I wanted to optomise my pages title tags and have found out as the site was done with smarty templates the site can only have a generic title tag throughout, don't know if anyone knows a way round this ?
My site is written in PHP linked to a SQL database using oscommerce as the shopping cart.
Any reviews or criticism would be welcome.
Thankyou
Martin
Jokingaround Fancy Dress

lukearndt — Fri, 24 Mar 2006 17:37:21 +0000

I like the look of the site. It's laid out nicely, and it has a clean, orderly look to it.

Riks — Thu, 23 Mar 2006 12:16:10 +0000

Your site is good in navigation, contents and structure.
Is easy to navigate and visitors don't get lost I suppose.

I only see a thing you can do better which is the menu buttons: now you can only click on texts, not in the entire menu box, which is not difficult to implement

demonhale — Wed, 22 Mar 2006 17:31:12 +0000

good job, good look on this type of site, most of what megan has said I like to repeat... Your site should some flair in the logo area, and really the gradient is bad... Also the first impression is really a shopping site rather than info site... try to rethink your layout attack... thats just my .2

Megan — Wed, 22 Mar 2006 16:35:48 +0000

That site doesn't work at all in Opera. All I get is a bunch of scrambled characters. I've never seen that before.

In Firefox it generally looks good. At first I thought this was as shopping site so I expected to see products on the front page not news items. You could maybe change the tagline to "High quality hardware information" instead of "database". It looks like you've got a lot of really good content here.

The design is good. For a site like this you don't need to be brilliant. Something simple and functional is all you need. I don't like that gradient in the background. I would change that to a solid grey instead. Overall the colour scheme is very bland. you could try to spinkle some of the yellow around the site a little more. Using it for headers would be a good idea - as it is the headers are the same colour as links which can be confusing (since one would assume that those headers are also links, which they're not).

The logo is okay but the HQ and HARDWARE parts sort of conflict because both are so heavily styled. Try simplifying the HARDWARE text so that the HQ takes emphasis. The problem here is that the two elements are competing for attention so the eye doesn't know where to focus. Keep the most important party styled and the rest simple, so only one area holds the emphasis.

I think it would be good to have a little more padding in that header block. Both the logo and the banner ad are too close to the edge there.

Overall a good job