Serious examination and judgment of my site - please

[DevML]

First I would like to introduce myself as I am a new member here at phpfreaks.  My name is Adam and I am an addict. . .  a long time developer in PHP and many other languages.  And my site, well, it's been around the block too if you know what I mean =)  The website is: www.zonehacks.com, formerly MSN Gaming Zone Hacks. After taking a year or two, maybe three off, I've decided to bring it back to life as a tutorial site for program development and webdesign - inspiring the uninspired as we had in the past.  After bringing the site back online I have forced my community through three layouts, hopefully they didn't mind, however, I think I have finally settled in.  You can look at some of the previous layouts and the site's beginnings at http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.zonehacks.com, however I don't think they had indexed any previous layouts from when I first put the site back up, as the layouts may have only been up for month or two at a time before being changed. 

 

Anyway, please let me know what you think of the site and any comments that you have.

 

Thank you =)

[nrg_alpha]

Overall, I like it. Clean and simple.

 

Only a few things to  comment on:

 

I noticed in the 'user stats' panel (right beside the main 'Latest in the forum' one), you have a link to login. Why not replace that link with the complete login fields, (including the forgot passowrod link, remember me check box and all). This way, returning visitors who wish to log in don't have to make the extra step of clicking a link just to get to the login area. Having built in login fields makes it easier..

 

One other thing is that your website doesn't have a base colour assigned to it in CSS. My browser's background colour is black (I didn't want the default white).. so as a result, I see the end of your horizontal tiling background, then the rest of the site's background is black. (to see what I mean.. if you are using firefox or Opera, open a new tab, and enter 'about:config', then in the options..there is a filter field. enter 'color', and look for background color setting.. (by default, its white: #ffffff).. change it black for instance: #00000 and review your site. You'll see what I mean).

 

So just assigning a simple css rule in your website's css file would solve this:

body {background-color: #ffffff;}

 

Other than that.. looks nice and neat. I'll have to have a detailed look into your PHP tutorials. Looks like some good info to learn from

 

Cheers,

 

NRG

 

[Fadion]

Overall its not bad, but theres a lot of room for improvement. Design wise its fairly simple and nice, probably too simple but that isnt ruining it. Feature wise there are many ways u can improve it (or probably u havent still finished it). Maybe some extra panels for tutorials/articles stats, featured or most view articles, top contributers and stuff like that. The forum isnt very feature rich. The categories are just plain titles, with no last post, post statistics, etc. In my opinion the site has a lot to be done and looks like its unfinished. Add more features and u can end up with smth nice.

 

[DevML]

Thank you for your reviews.  I will definitely set a default background colour, did not cross my mind as I do not make a lot of websites with white backgrounds.  The site is a work in progress and far from complete.  Like most of you probably are, I am the biggest critique of my own work, and a lot of the time I am not satisfied in the end.  It's a problem I've been trying to tame, though I think I can make this one work.