REVIEW REQUEST: AIM (www.interactivemarketing.org)

Firstly welcome to TWF and thanks for reviewing some of the other sites here.

My first impression is that it looks like a lot of other sites and is rather text heavy. This isn't helped by the plainness of the logo/header which would look better and stand out more in a more unique font. I'm also not keen on the colours as the black sections seem to make it seem rather heavy.

Well done for getting a drop down menu that appears to work in all browsers!

It's a little boxy but I don't have any real problems with it.

I'm not sure why the Recent AIM Updates headline is justified to the left though, or why there's so much white space around it, drawing the eye to nothing in particular.

I see a big long string of text at the top (looks like spamming keywords) with the layout appearing halfway down the page. This is in Opera 6 by the way. I also don't see any sort of a drop down menu like the Webmistress mentioned so I guess this is something that doesn't work in all browsers after all. Or maybe all those words at the top are from your menu. If you look in the Site Tools forum here you'll find a thread that lists some menu scripts that do work in all browsers.

So, anyway, I'll switch to mozilla for the purpose of this review.

I agree that the layout is overly text heavy. This seems to be a popular thing to do with marketing sites but I think that it just makes it difficult to figure out what to focus on. There's too much pulling for my attention here.

Try to use design elements to provide contrast and allow users to focus on the important information. For example, in this design red has been used to provide contrast and let elements stand out from the others. However, these red elements are scattered around the page which makes it difficult to focus on one at a time.

In addition, everything here is on a white or black background. This makes it difficult to differentiate between content, page headers, navbars, and ads. You don't have to do everything on a different background, but at least provide a way to let the navbars stand out as different from the ads on the sidebars there. You could just do your sidebars on a grey background, which would allow the ads to be visually differentiated (since they have a white background, while text links would be on grey). This would also tie in the grey from the dropdown menu into the rest of the design and serve to neutralize it a bit (overall the page shows strong contrast between black, white and red - grey would help to tone things down a little bit).

The menu works for me fine in Opera ??

Which version are you running? I've got 6.0, so this might be something that was fixed in 6.05.

I'm using version 6 as well

6.0? not 6.05? Okay, that's odd then. I'll have to check this at home and see if I'm getting the same problem there.

Are you using Opera as Opera, or Opera as IE ? The menu doesnt work in Opera6 as Opera6, and I also get all the keywords at top, a whole page of them at 800x600, funny thing is there is " SPAMStop SPAMIssue" in there lol

I look at the title and site and are confused, to me AIM is an instant messagner program, but seems you have the same name. confusing

I don't mind the layout but the colors are very blah. I browsed through a few pages and it seems you right in there but your "theme" or lack of it is letting you down.
The images that are on the pages are blurry, to much bold text which clashes with the black sections, your eyes aren't drawen anywhere, or maybe it's just to early in the morning for me, but I am finding my eyes are going all over the place not finding a start point, or point of interest.

In your middle section your using default links (blue and underlined) but on the sides they are black and not underlined

Opera 6.05 here and I am seeing a list of words at the top above the table. Looks like the contents of your menu.

Looks fine in IE 5.5. The colors aren't very inviting. They look too "serious".

That is a big site. Nice job putting it together.

Ahhhhh! I had only just reinstaled Opera and had forgotten to change it back to opera. Now I get the text at the top and that's not good! I also automatically associate AIM with aol's messenger.

Wow...you guys are fast!

Thanks for all your comments. Need to fix the menus, didn't catch the opera as opera bug.

Some things I can't change due to requirements of course (basic colors) but I really appreciate some of the link-color advice as well as the way the menus need to be differentiated from the text.

AIM / AOL IM confused me when I first got here too. Guess there's not much I can do about that

Thanks...I'll look at getting this into a new release!