One of the biggest Social Networking Community site for review

[Festy]

Hi folks,

 

This is the site I developed in my company with my team for one of my client. It's a social networking community site with enormous number of features like: blog, forums, private/public messages, mobile/email alerts, audio,video, video scripting like youtube, free web space, audio/video + text chat, audio/video recorder, games/ringtones/trutones download for your mobile, profile page and everything you need for communication..... Please review and tell me how it is.

 

Here's the link: www.buzz2hype.com

 

 

[cs.punk]

Hi folks,

 

This is the site I developed in my company with my team for one of my client. It's a social networking community site with enormous number of features like: blog, forums, private/public messages, mobile/email alerts, audio,video, video scripting like youtube, free web space, audio/video + text chat, audio/video recorder, games/ringtones/trutones download for your mobile, profile page and everything you need for communication..... Please review and tell me how it is.

 

Here's the link: www.buzz2hype.com

 

It's heavy.. Some people don't like heavy sites... Im using my mobile as a modem and after what 20 seconds nothing showed up, and I still have images set to off.

[waynew]

Hi.

 

1: It is pretty heavy.

2: I like the look of it. Very clean.

3: Maybe you should style the textfields? Default textfields are an eyesore.

4: The thumbnails of key members look a little distorted.

5: I see that you're using some of Facebook's icons. Are you sure that's a wise idea?

6: The footer should probably be given a little bit more breathing space. Looks squashed.

7: Nothing is showing up in the Forum or Event boxes. Is this because there are no forum topics yet?

8: I like the way it looks as if it's full of features. Looks busy.

9: I like the way the thumbnails lighten when you roll over them.

10: Maybe member login / registration boxes should come before buzz of the day? Might gain you that extra few conversions.

[Axeia]

Like mentioned it does load too slow, and it will STAY heavy as you made ALL of the CSS inline. It's going to need to plow trough that before even starting on the page itself, very very bad idea.

Did you use some kind of editor creating this mess? It has lots of things like this:

a{
font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
}
a:hover {
font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
}

Really.. the font-family isn't going to change on a hover, so that's just useless CSS making the page bigger than it needs to be.

If you indeed wish for that site to become popular you should take user wishes in mind, there are various reports that people prefer speed above anything.

• http://www.websiteoptimization.com/speed/tweak/design-factors/
  
• http://www.websiteoptimization.com/speed/tweak/usability-criteria/
  
• http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html (this one has some VERY nice examples on what to do and what not to do)
  

Besides the ton of inline CSS, you used tables for the layout which besides being bad for usability are also slowing down the page as the browser needs to load the entire table for knowing what to do with it. unless you took active steps to speed up table rendering ).

Worst mistake by miles is that you actually scaled down images instead of using thumbnails.

[*]Forms should use <labels> with the for attribute set to the for elements id.

[*]Why aren't the images inside the same <a> as the text for Upload Pictures, Upload Music, Upload Videos?

[*] CSS sprites learn about them, use them, love them.

[*]http://www.buzz2hype.com/event?menu=err&id=unauthorized Firefox is warning me for a redirect loop here

[*]http://www.smushit.com/ysmush.it/ "Smushed 30.38% or 144.54 KB" With some CSS sprites and a smart approach on how to use images I think it could be well under 90KB

 

In short,

I'd suggest you and your team read up on Yahoo's best practices as it's a really useful read be it a long one and avoid using tables for layout. Also tables are for (suprise) tabular data,  look into using semantic web design not only does it do you search engine rating a ton of good it also increases accessibility.

[nrg_alpha]

To add to the smushit suggestion, download the latest version of Yahoo's Yslow (which has a 'tools' tab containing some optimization tools (such as smushit, JSLint, JS Minified, etc...). You have 12 javascripts clocking in at 123.8K. I'm not sure if those scripts are minified or not.. I would consider merging / minifying where possible.

 

I am noticing that you are loading entire images for thumbnails (like on the home page 'Key Members' section). This not only yields to bad squished/squashed photo dimensions, also adds additional unnecessary bandwidth.

 

By employing the principals within the yahoo performance links Axia provided, you can improve speed payload / response times considerably. As it stands, the home page is 75 HTTP requests and is 785.5K.. pretty hefty.. lots of wasted bandwidth to be sure (both for you and for your visitors).

 

Optimization issues not withstanding.. I also used had a look at your site's SEO. It appears you don't have any. There is no use of heading tags (<h1>,<h2>, etc...), nor do you have a meta description tag (something pretty useful). The meta keywords tag can be safely axed, as this is now pretty useless. If you want to increase your visibility in searches, I would definitely look into employing some effective SEO techniques.

 

I would consider looking into getting your markup to validate, as well as your css.

[Festy]

Thanks for you valuable insight on the design of our site nrg_alpha, Axeia, waynewex and cs.punk. I've already started working on the shortcomings you guys have highlighted so far. Here's the improvement:

 

1. The mail culprit of slow page load were the thumbnails. The thumbnail were not the actual thumbnail images and in fact were scaled down from the original images. This was causing the full images to be loaded, hence increased time in page load.

I now have proper thumbnail script in place. And only the thumbnail images are fetched were thumbnail images are required to be shown. Furthermore, if you want to see the original images, you can see them in the photo gallery of that member.

 

2. Alxeia, although there are some inline CSS applied on the site, the actual styling on the 'whole' site is done through external CSS. Though, I've also started working on your suggestion and will clean up the unwanted and inline CSS soon.

 

3. Regarding the table structure:

Well the site has been in development for more than 2 years now, since it is a very big site and when I took over the developement of this site, the basic design structure was already in place and it was hard to change that at the time, so the best thing I can do now is to speed up the table rendering.

 

4. nrg_alpha, the site is very much optimized for SEO as far the development is concerned. For e.g. the profile page has the URLs:

 

www.buzz2hype.com/parv (no registration required to view the profile page)

 

Blog page:

www.buzz2hype.com/blog/billy (registration required to view a blog)

 

Downloads:

www.buzz2hype.com/download/games etc... (registration required to download games/ringtones/trutones for you mobile)

 

 

and several other urls like that. But yes, I need to use the <h1><h2> for my templates and I'll do that surely.

 

Finally, the home page is just the highlighting of the stuffs which you get inside. Please try to review that as well as I believe the design and features are very elegant.

 

Keep you valuable feedback coming guys. It's very helpful.

 

[nrg_alpha]

4. nrg_alpha, the site is very much optimized for SEO as far the development is concerned.

 

Actually, I don't believe it is. There is more to SEO than SEO-friendly URLs. heading tags (<h1>,<h2> etc..) encompass heading and subheadings and gives more importance to search engines than say regular text. Even words that are set in <strong> or <em> tags have more weight / importance than regular text.

 

Adding to this, as I mentioned before.. your 'description' meta tag is empty. The content of that tag is what shows up in the search results. But yours is blank (not good for SEO at all).

 

As for the <title> tag (on your home page for example), it is simply 'Buzz2Hype'. This is not as descriptive as it could be. The title tag should be a short descriptive sentence. Some thing along the lines of 'Sharing community blogs, photographs, videos and news | Buzz2Hype' (or something along those lines) would be much better.

 

And finally, the one thing you did put in for SEO, but is not useful anymore is the 'keywords' meta tag. In the past, many sites started cramming high-ranking keywords into this tag (key words that weren't even relevant to their site). As a result, major search engines don't pay much attention to this tag anymore.. So you can safely remove it.

 

---

 

As for design, here are my additional points.

 

- I noticed you fixed the images in 'Key Members'. Good!

 

- A very small little crit about the mini 'Sign up |  Help |  English' menu at the very top.. I would push that in a little so that the right edge of the flag lines up with everything else on the right side of the content.. Looks a little strange sticking out like that.

 

- To be honest, I'm not fond of the 'Take a tour' flash animation. It feels 'amateurish'. To make things more lightweight, I would consider axing that. As mentioned by others.. your site is heavy on bandwidth (currently, home page sites at 75 HTTP requests and weighs 608.8K bytes - That can be cut down quite a bit... especially the HTTP requests). You really should have a look at the Yahoo performance link Axeia provided a few posts up, and really understand what it is saying. Otherwise, your site is just gobbling up useless bandwidth, which is not only a waste for you, but for your visitors as well.

 

- related to that comment, I notices that the 'Buzz of the day' link is pretty much the 'about' aspect of the site (which is similar to the un named panel below the 'Key Members'). Looks like you have too many redundant panels..So I would consider placing that un named panel in where the 'Take a tour' panel is, axe the buzz of the day panel and have the 'Member Login' in its place. This will reduce the amount of panels on the home page, which reduces clutter and organizes things better.

 

- You have 'Get 2 GB' and 'Mobile Chat video conference' panels that do nothing (they are not even links). Is it worth having those panels there? Can they be merged into one panel to reduce clutter even more?

 

- You have an ad for an Italian Limo service which just looks strange in it's current location and format. If your site doesn't have much traffic, I would consider axing this too to help further organize and reduce clutter.

 

A good book worth considering is called Don't make me think, which deals with web usability. It discusses how people scan and not read pages (initially anyway), and how we as designers think a page is well laid out, but how visitors see things differently. There are chapters about optimizing copy by reducing things to being much shorter and more readable (I thought of this once I read the paragraphs within the 'Buzz of the day' link) as well as how to kill visitor 'goodwill' (think of 'what NOT to do' kind of things). You can read the reviews to see more of what it's about. It's a small book, but packed with pretty useful tidbits like these. Worth taking a look at IMO.

 

So all in all.. While the site looks half decent, I am seeing a cluttered, disorganized home page that can use some serious 'house cleaning' (along with optimizations and SEO implementation). It has potential.. but a lot of work needs to be done IMO.