Honest Feedback and Suggestions Wanted

[cumbrowski]

My Internet Resources Site at Cumbrowski.com is now over 1 year old (1 year and 3 months "officially"). This site is more "hobby" than business, although the content is business related. What I mean by that is that the site is not my business and main source of income. It's my business card and my personal "del.icio.us" site.

It happened by accident and was not planned, which is the reason why some things are not the way they should. The site grew from a one page favorite links list to a site with far beyond 175 pages of content.

The lack of planning created several issues for me, such as the lack of an integrated content management system and well developed site template design and layout.

Site to Review!

I have for months a new site design flying around, which is not integrated yet. It must be tweaked etc. I don't even want to start working on it, until I have some better idea and plan how the site should look like.


I played with a number of things regarding the site structure, navigation and the layout of details and hope that most of those changes were actually improving on the sites usability and made it easier for people to find stuff.

Since I can't judge my own stuff realistically and test what works and what does not, would I like to hear honest feedback about what SUCKS about the site and what WORKS well and should be kept in the new site design. The site search is Google custom search engine (paid version without Ads)

I recently started to work on the readability of the main resources pages. You can compare the old look and feel with the new one on the examples of the resources pages for Email marketing (old layout) and the one for Web Analytics (new layout)

I would appreciate feedback from anybody who is willing to let me know his brutally honest opinion. Don't hold back. If you think that something sucks, fonts, color, structure, layout, content, menu, images, designs whatever, please say it. You won't hurt my feelings, I promise.

Thanks a lot.
Cheers!

[Linda Buquet]

Hi Carsten,

I tried to take a quick look but the new design link does not resolve for me.
Also the Email marketing (old layout) and the one for Web Analytics (new layout) l
ook the same to me. I don't see a difference, but I only took a quick peek.

[cumbrowski]

Thanks Linda,

I fixed the link to the new template design that a professional designer did for me. There was a line break in the URL code which caused the addition of some garbage characters to the URL.

The difference between the web analytics and email marketing pages is in the layout of the main content of each page. I use on the web analytics page small 100x50 pixel logos of each service provider for example. I also used bulleted lists for collections of resources, such as articles or white papers. The background color of the cross referenced content boxes within the content is now different (yellowish) and on the left is a related subjects box.

Quite some differences eh? Obviously not very visually dramatic and easy to notice a difference if you only look at them briefly. I hope that it helps if you really look over the resources in greater detail. What do you think?


Cheers!

[Linda Buquet]

Ohhhh I really like the new template design a LOT!

The differences on the other 2 pages are so subtle no one but you would notice, me thinks.
IMHO the purple gradation on the old site makes it look a little dated or something.
You said be brutal...

[cumbrowski]

Hi Linda,

Originally Posted by Linda Buquet

Ohhhh I really like the new template design a LOT!

I like it too, but I need to change a number of things to make the new design work. I have to make compromises and give some things up. I want to know which ones

Originally Posted by Linda Buquet

The differences on the other 2 pages are so subtle no one but you would notice, me thinks.

My feeling was that it looked to cluttered. I hoped to improve on that with the display of the logos. The logos also help to recognize familar things (as reassurance that you are on the right page so to speak)

Originally Posted by Linda Buquet

IMHO the purple gradation on the old site makes it look a little dated or something.

Somebody else said something about the looking dated too, but was not able to specify why he felt that. The gradient you think? I made a quick change and removed the background and title tag gradients. Have a look. Does that look better to you?

Originally Posted by Linda Buquet

You said be brutal...

By all means!!! Anything else would not help me... seriously.


Thanks again.
Cheers!

[Linda Buquet]

Yes I think that looks better. Gradients are in now - it's very 2.0 and I even have one now. But for some reason the purple gradient just reminded me of one of the old front page sites people used to make. I think it looks more professional now with the solid dark background.

Good luck getting things squared away for the new template. I know how hard site changes can be.

[cumbrowski]

Thanks Linda.

The biggest thing will be the CMS. I have to shop around and find one that fits my needs and is not too hard to make it work. I am not looking forward to it. Actually that's the main reason why I didn't do the change yet and drag this problem around with me for 7 or so months now

I hope somebody will comment on the navigation, search and usability. I need to know what to keep, what to ditch and what to change, to make sure that it will be incorporated properly into the new design.

Cheers!