ZoneHacks.com

[DevML]

I've posted here before, however, I thought it would be better to just create a new topic.

 

I have done a couple major updates to the website: more features to forum, profiles, added login on main page, added better content boxes, forced body background to white as someone informed me here that some browsers allow you to change the default background color.

 

Will you review the website again and let me know what you think?  http://www.zonehacks.com/

 

Little information about the website:

ZoneHacks is a development community providing lots of great tutorials including php, mysql, assembly, cpp, vb, and more.  Every script on the site is custom made including the forum!

[aximbigfan]

I like the general design!

 

you may want to remove the "No photo" default image, and just make it blank space though.

 

Chris

[nrg_alpha]

It's a very nice and clean design. Just some points to consider:

 

- Since you have this extra space along the top menu, why not build in the login fields and submit button into this at the far right hand side as opposed to having users need to click on login link? Just saves one extra step from the user's standpoint.

- The site doesn't handle font-only scaling well. Your top menu should expand vertically to encapsulate the content as the content gets larger.. and the username and password fields in the 'Account Management' panel sticks out of the panel when font size is increased. I would perhaps make them by default slightly wider, and set that width in css so that those fields do not get longer in the event the user bumbs up the font size.

- Speaking of font sizes.. I noticed that the fonts are a step bigger in Firefox 3 than it is in Google Chrome or Opera for example. Have you set this in your css file that involves the font setup?

 

body {
font-size: xx-small; /* for IE5/Win */
voice-family: "\"}\"";
voice-family: inherit;
font-size: x-small; /* for compliant browsers */
}

 

This should help make the font sizes pretty much universal across other browsers..

 

- I am a big believer on site optimizations.. I plugged your homepage through Firefox's Firebug using the YSlow extension. I was surprised by a couple of things just testing your homepage as an example.

Your homepage ranked as an F grade (40).. so I looked at why this is.. here is some things I found:

• You are using 15 javascripts and 13 css background images... kind of heavy. I would look into somehow reducing those.
  
• Your homepage is not gzipped. If you add the following line at the top of your page, (and assuming your server is configured to gzip certain files), your server should gzip your .php documents if the browser viewing your page supports it:
  

  if (substr_count($_SERVER['HTTP_ACCEPT_ENCODING'], 'gzip')) ob_start("ob_gzhandler"); else ob_start();

  
  This will reduce download sizes `and thus save you some bandwidth (especially if this site get more and more traffic).
  

• You should move your javascripts to the bottom of the page if possible, as this is one component of a webpage that tends to lock up web-browsers while they download the scripts.. having them at the bottom (if possible) leaves the page to download without interuption.. then once the content is done, the javascript is loaded.
  
• Consider minifying your javascripts.
  

 

I would encourage you to view the summary of site optimizations, as they are truly useful in helping build fast websites that save on response times as well as bandwidth.

 

Other than that, I think it looks really nice and clean.

 

Hope that all helps out.

 

Cheers,

 

NRG

 

[nrg_alpha]

P.S I see this in some sample code snippets:

 

·········10········20········30········40········50········60········70········80········90········100·······

 

What is that? (Just curious).

 

Cheers,

 

NRG

 

EDIT - Nevermind.  (those line length indicators are not necessary IMO though).