REVIEW REQUEST: ApogeeTek.com

Well your site is a good start, but I think it's lacking that "x-factor" which makes a good.

I say it's ok, but something is stopping it from making it good

I dont think a black background and a white foreground go together very well. The site looks a little cluttered because of that banner up the top (on the content pages) and the one on the left hand side. Your site has quite a good loading time and the site structure is ok. Besides the bad things, you have a nice site going there, keep up the good work.

Well you've got a massive horizontal scroll at 800x600 but perhaps you are catering to a "hi-res audience" here. Hi-res has its problems also. The header/banner section covers 100% width while the content section doesn't. This leaves a void to the right and everything looks unbalanced.

Your advertising banner is huge. It robs your site of all focus. Combine this with the fact that your page titles are non-existant beyond the 10px breadcrumb nav and the site becomes a little tricky to navigate. Where am I again?

I also find that the right column looks kind of "tacked on" to the site.

What else... Way too many different link styles in play. It becomes counter-intuitive to me

I agree with what Taff said. I think this is a good start but the focus is off with that gigantic banner ad. It really doesn't fit with the scale of the other elements (small logo, small navigation etc.) Speaking of navigation, please don't style links the same way as plain text. Navbars should stand out both visually and functionally.

I do like what you've done with the colours and the logo. It's a good start, just needs some refinement.

thanks for the feedback so far, and as for the scrollbar on the low res (800x600) i made it so people see everything minus the right hand column at this res, which is why it may look "tacked" on. but, this is also a tech site who's target audience is the "tech-savvy" and i doubt they would be using anything below 1024x768.

i agree with you guys on the nav, i just havent got around to making something. I'll have to get on that. =)

and the reason for the header/banner section covering 100% is because it goes from fixed design (the site) to the liquid (the forums) so i wanted it to blend well.

as for the top banner, ill be thinking of what i could do to blend it into the site a little more, its good advertising space though, has a good CTR it also appears randomly

thanks for all the replies, keep em comin! =)

-chase
http://www.apogeetek.com

wants me to d/l flash player6 - I wont
over 2 minutes to load on dialup. you really need to compress your graphics, that gaming one for example is 72kb. I could be "tech-savvy" but where I am dialup is pretty much our only option
you say your target audience is the "tech-savvy" but at what age group, I thought the content wasn't to bad until I started seeing smilies, things like

Quote: Check CNN.com or something for more information. =P

I reckon loose the top advertising banner and make your banner bigger

Yeah, remove the places for the all the advertising, it clutters up your page and it looks really messy.

If you want to keep some advertising, make the top banner smaller (around about the same size as the one you see at TWF) and lose the ad underneath the navigation that asks if you would like to adversite on the site, why not just put that in text? it slows down the page loading time and is ... quite frankly useless ...

remove all the advertising?!? you crazy?! lol

the side banner under the nav isnt useless, that ad is just a placeholder till i get advertising clients. and at 8k it doesnt slow down the page that much.

well you don't HAVE to remove it if you don't want to, but resize them and make them smaller would have just about the same effect...

I agree on the ad thing - the main point I get about the site is you offer ADVERTISING! Everything else looks secondary. What's more important, your content or your advertising?

As for the scroll - why not make it a fluid design so that everyone can see everything? At 800x600 if I see a horizontal scroll, I scroll. There's content there, so instead of assuming "Hey, he designed this so I could only see bits of it, he's so cool", I think "Oh, yet another site that makes me scroll horizontally to see all the content."

yeah i know what you mean, i just changed it a bit. now, if the top ad shows up, the side ad wont, and vice-versa, that way they both never show up at the same time so it doesnt look crowded with advertisements but i'm still getting good impression ratings. what do you guys think? improvement?

I agree with everyone else, the top advertising banner is overpowering everything else, especially your own logo. IMO you should make your own logo bigger and incorporate a 468x60 banner next to it and that way your actual content would take presidence rather than the advertising.

I also agree that the site should be made to fit 800*600 rather than making people scroll for the content.

You are either using a meta tag refresh, or have both a default and an index page. Confusing after navigating your web. Your "home" links take you back to "index.php", so I'm assuming that you're using a default when a browser "go's" to your url.

Other than that bit of confusion, the site seems tight and compact, not too "adverty", and the content is a direct hit for your target. Nice forums too -- those PHP forum scripts are quite the rage, easy to setup and configure, and db link well.

Overall, I'd recommend your site.

Jim Miotke
www.idbDeveloper.com

What a superb site, rammed with info, top reviews and looks great, user friendly and simple layout. 9/10 in my eyes

well, actually, the server just points to the index.php as the default page so either / or /index.php work for the homepage. same page =)