Webuser Forums: DIY website

Hi,

my wife and I have just had a good look through your excellent site. There is so much useful content there - I'll bookmark it for sure!

Nanook has covered a lot of the things I would have mentioned - if you work on the layout it would really improve the site since people may be put off spending a lot of time on the site if they judge a book by its cover / a site by its homepage!

But yes, wow! What an excellent resource site. I've also had a lot of help from the people on the SitePoint forum, which is a forum similar to this one, but seems to have a lot more traffic, or at least, a lot more replies on the posts.

A few points anyway, at the risk of repeating Nanook:

1. The overall layout, esp. of the homepage, looks very cluttered. It's not easy to know where to go next.

2. The big list of links down the left (in the form of the images) don't seem to be in any order. It might make more sense to arrange them into sections - since 'Humour' (some of those links are great by the way) doesn't seem to have anything to do with 'electrical' or 'landlords'. Also, if these links were text links it may help with your search engine rankings as they like text links. Also, the actual text would be jucy keywords for the SEs - since the links are images at the moment they don't really help much with SE rankings, plus the other reasons Nanook mentions are good ones for not relying too much on images for links.

2a. It doesn't seem very consistent having a bit list of link images on the left, and then having some text links below there.

2b. The user's experience on the site could really be aided with some clear layout, and more consistent navigation. This may take some time as you have a lot of content, but maybe it'd be better to have fewer links on the homepage, grouped into broad categories. i.e:

i) DIY topics >> links to a bit list of links to all your DIY articles - again this page could group your articles into clear sub headings (building / plumbing / painting etc.)

ii) general >> links to your disclaimer, supplier & tradesmen indexes, safety first etc

iii) other > humour, build a website...

3. It'd be nice to have an 'about' page (in my opinion) so people can read about you, why you set the site up, what your experience is etc.

4. Your header image looks a bit grainy and pixellated, which tends to make the site look a bit amateurish. It's probably best to replace this with a more professional looking logo, or else replace it comepletely with text. (in my opinion!)

All the best

Jim

split figs on the internet

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