Review of news site

It's not bad as a news site goes. The thing that I liked best was the consistant look from page to page. You just need to work on a few things like:

• Logo - to give you some identification you should have some kind of logo on your site.
• Length of page - the opening page is a bit too long. Some other news sites will use nested tables to create a newspaper type look. The length could be okay if you maybe used some nav lengths at the top using the a name attribute. Like have a link at the top that says Europe, Asia, Other, etc.
• Table size - I think that you could safely increase your table size about 100px to 750px or so. Few people still use 640x480 resolution.
• Better than Drudge Report - you really don't have to have much design at all to be better than Drudge's site. Now just to get some of his content.

Overall impression was good. I would just work on a logo and maybe some graphics and some of the other things mentioned.

All echo Mairving's comments and add that the site really needs some color. Maybe try adding some photographs or a colorful logo.

Sianews,

Looks interesting. Layout, usability, loading speed, colors etc. are all good and I suggest you start to look at other aspects.

The front page is a bit too 'text only' - I would have liked to have seen at least 1 picture for each category.

As I don't know who you are the first link I pressed was 'about', so perhaps this could be placed in the top bar of options. I suggest you change the tense in 'about' to present instead of the mixture of present and future. I would like to read in 'about' something about you as people - why are you doing this site, what makes you tick.

The juxtaposition of "fair political news from a trusted perspective" in your banner and "Get the US out of the UN by signing this petition" at the base appears to me to be in conflict. Either you are fair or you are campaigning for a particular viewpoint. I don't think it matters which, it just cannot be both at the same time .

Stephen

Welcome to this part of the forum sianews.

I agree with the others, definitely needs some colour & some images to brighten it up some. Very good start though.

I hope you stick around and give some feedback to the other sites posted in this forum.

Thanks for the replies. In the other forums I posted this as well the concenus seems to be "add graphics". But as you guys mentioned, there is an awful lot of text on the front page, and I'm afraid graphics will slow it down considerably.

"I think that you could safely increase your table size about 100px to 750px or so."

I had though about that as well, but most summaries are only 1-2 lines anyway, the length is coming from the amount of entries, not the narrow borders.

I'll work on the about page and possibly change the slogan.

Quote: Originally posted by sianews
Thanks for the replies. In the other forums I posted this as well the concenus seems to be "add graphics". But as you guys mentioned, there is an awful lot of text on the front page, and I'm afraid graphics will slow it down considerably.

As you don't have any graphics on the page at all it really wouldn't slow it down much as long as the graphics were suitable and compressed correctly.

I have adsl so it wouldn't slow it down for me but according to dreamweaver calculations the site takes 6 seconds at 28kbps with text only, done right some strategically placed graphics will not slow it down too much more and break up the text helping it to be easier to read as well.

Wow, I'm really impressed that you are including news from different countries. I was wondering when I first got there though, so maybe you should include links to go further down the page to the europe, asia, and middle east sections (hey, why not change United States to North America? We've had some pretty interesting political news in Canada lately). I think it would be good if you could make this sort of a global resource for conservative news, since you're already doing that to an extent anyway.

Now, the top of the page kind of confuses me, because you've basically said the same thing twice (sianews is your source for conservative news) and the "top stories . world news . national news . religious front" part looks like it should be navigation. BTW, who's national news? Everyone's?

I agree with the others that you can add some more graphics. I also think that your links should not be the same colour as text - could be confusing for some. Adding a contrasting colour would be good too.