What do you think of this ?

[astereo]

Hello everyone. I'm new here, and obviously this is my first post of what I hope to be many more!

I'd like to know what you all think of my designer / developer resource Devlounge.
Some of you may have seen it already in your journeys through various designer / developer resources. Feel free to let me know what you think!

Kind regards,
AJ

[Steax]

Hi! Looks like a pretty interesting site. A few things...
1. There's the date on the top right. I've always wondered why websites tell us the date that we can check in 12,576 other places?
2. The homepage material seems to point more into other sites and job openings rather than your own content.
3. Too many ads!
4. The search submit button doesn't look like one.
5. I don't like the inverted date/category text.

But once I get into the articles themselves, then your site shows to its full potential! Great stuff!

[astereo]

You think two ads is too many ?

[Steax]

Yes, because they're right in the middle of your content. It makes me unconsciously think before I click, is this an ad or part of your site? I also don't like the iframes.. they make it extremely annoying trying to scroll (with the mouse scroll) down your page.

[entity]

I actually like the site very much.
I don't have much of a problem with the iframes or the ads...

[karinne]

Hey AJ ... well ... I'm an *sporadic* reader of your site

I got it bookmarked and I come in once in a while to read it. I really like the design and the articles.

Keep up the good work!

[Jenni]

I liked everything about your website: design, colors and the content of course! Very informative and interesting and as for ads in the middle of your homepage, I don't see any problem with them.

[seanmiller]

My comments, without trying to seem critical for the sake of it, would be :-

- the top block of the design, where you have your logo, your tagline and the date looks rather unbalanced. It might be that losing the salmon-coloured background on the tagline, and perhaps moving it a few pixels down so that it lines up with the bottom of the logo would help... the date is also in rather an odd format which isn't immediately intuitive to me. Again, if you really want a date I'd tend to go for "September 1st 2007" or similar which is immediately obvious.

- the site is not particularly accessible to those with resolutions less than 1024x768 as it is of a fixed width. Normally if people do this they tend to make the last 200px or so of the design less important, perhaps the place they stick the adverts, so that those on 800x600 (and there are still a relatively large number, though diminishing by the day) don't actually miss any of the important content. Something to, perhaps, bear in mind.

- extending the second block down the full width of the page is, imho, counter-productive as the eye doesn't really know where to look. I'd personally be inclined to maybe take the hyperlinks below and their dates and put them in a right hand column and put the blog on the left, which would break up the page.

- the rest of the design is okay, though I would suggest perhaps somewhat "busy". I tend to work on clean easy-to-read pages, and there is so much content there that I find it hard, again, to really work out what the page is trying to do. I would probably simplify it, but these things are very subjective and others might love it.

Sean