Hello!

I wanted to give it a try and see if anyone would like to say something on the overall look and feel of libervis.com. How do you like it? How would you rate it? What would you like to change? etc.

I am satisfied with how XOOPS performes and everything works fine except i have some stupid issues with wfsections. It's defeinitely the hardest part of the site to manage. It's options just seem to be too scattered. It seems like it just has too many options to handle itself as it should. I very much hope that it would be better in the next versions and i hope it'll be very soon.

Thank you!

Daniel

well, Im no webmaster....and its much better than mine right now....but when I viewed your site...the first thing I thought was..."Information OVERLOAD".

The thing I had to learn when I started using xoops, was, Just becuase you have it, does not mean you have to use it.

If you want to really display that much information at once, at least try to break up the flow and define actual sections using different shades of your main color scheme or something. Just one n00bs opionion...

Thanks for reply.

Your comment is interesting since as with many other webmasters, my goal is to have a site with alot of content. Now if you meant that content is kind of un-organized or put too much on one page (you probably meant homepage) than you probably suggest that i remove recent or top articles, recent or top links, or maybe recent and most viewed forum topics which are all on homepage.

But i am not sure if i'd do that.. Homepage is meant to be the intersection of other parts of the site so i actually wanted it to show some excerpts from all sections..

What would you suggest to remove?

Thank you!
Daniel

I opened your site, and the first thing I noticed that it takes a long time to load. I waited, and all the sudden was flooded with something that looks nice, but very hard to read.

I think a good exam for any site would be if the visitor can within 5-10 seconds realize what this site is about and how to find what he wants in there. If you fail this test, most visitors will do what I did - hit the 'back' button.

Remove a lot of the content from the homepage, make it readable, only basic information, etc. Think google.

Thanks Iolai for the review.

I turned on caching in order to make it load faster and i also removed alot of content from the homepage which will also add up to the loading speed, but also make the homepage more easily understandable and viewable since it's not overloaded with info. You were right, i put too much content on the homepage.

I also edited that short intro, made it shorter, but more direct in telling a visitor what exactly the site is, but i also added a new section that's linked from that intro which describes them the reasons why they should join if they have ANY interest in free open source software world. Additionally, there are links to about us and mission statement pages so that they can easily see what's the site all about just by scanning all or some of those texts.

I also put the excepts from forums on the homepage at the top to show 10 instead of 5 recent forum topics and removed "mos active topics" and "most viewed topics" since i think they just choked the homepage. I'd say that from the first look on it you could tell it's a community oriented portal about free software/open source.

Okay, i think it improves the whole thing, but i'd like to hear your opinions and suggestions.

Thank you for your time.
Daniel

Much cleaner, more organised. Well thought out. Could use a little less on the block usage, like top posters, new users, who's online and such. Something I Would consider is removing those block from the anonymous group. Allow the registered users to see that sort of thing if you like.

One other thing I would do is place your login block at the very top, above your search on the right. This makes it easier for users to know where to log in without scrolling, and tells new visitors that there is registrations and they may get curious as to what they can do if they register.

Good job on the improvments overall. I hope you don't mind my two cents, I tend to simplify my sites and have only just started to get back to the basics, content and presentation.

Well, it's not like i'm a professional in content and design arrangements or something.. So, i did most of what you proposed since your suggestions are good..

I put the login and user menu at the top right and removed the top posters block from anonymous users group (in permissions) so that only registered members can view those, while i still left "new members" block just to make new visitors aware that we do have new registrations and additionally encourage them to register too. I also left "who's online" because i think it's fun to see how many people are on and from the same reason mentioned above.

Thanks for suggestions!
More from others are welcome of course ;)
Daniel

I like it, you now have user related stuff on one side, and content links and menus on the other. It kind f gives it more structure that people will notice when they first go to the site.

I would put the center "Recent Forums Posts" at the bottom. This is something that also annoys me about xoops.org. As a regular user, of course I am interested in forum postings, but first...The News! Place it at the bottom of the page.

Try to get that intro even shorter, and post a link to a mission statement, where you elaborate further. Many words used in the intro are just repetition.

And I have to agree with the previous poster, try and reduce the number of blocks. There are a few too many (does the annonymous user have to know who's online, who are the newest members?), try to use blocks more section specific.

Besides that, I enjoyed looking and judging your efforts;) Keep up the good work! (created a new webicon for your site - sent a contact notice via the site; just in case http://jason.jayro.net/uploads/libervisWebicon.ico ; just had to do something, after I couldn't make out the existing one)

libervis:

A few additional suggestions, if you don't mind:

1) Two notes regarding the introductory text: a) change the styling to make it more readable, like the text of the "About us" page, for instance; b) reduce the word count. Think of it as a mission statement: should be short, sweet and to the point. I guess this comment includes also a free comment about the length of your mission statement...

2) I'm not sure about how you did the block labeled "Sub Menu" (probably with a MultiMenu), but I'm sure of this: a) You need to look for a better label; 2) you might try to use Tiny Content for these pages. I assume they are now static pages that need to be edited by hand; the menu just points to them. If you use Tiny Content, you'll be able to manage them --that is, it'll be easier to edit them.

3) The icon used to denote the topic is at the far left of the text block, but it leaves a white gap there. I think this would look better at the far left and without the gap. You can do that easily with something like a floated span (just take out the spaces): < span style="float:left; width: 20px; margin-right: 6px;" >< img src="etc" width="20" height="20" />< /span >.

4) Change a simple value in your theme stylesheet to make the default line height a larger value. In a 1024x768 screen your text lines are too long (around 120 characters). Giving the text more air will make it more readable. It will also hide the fact that lines with smilies impose a line height.

5) If I were you, I'd take out at least the blue bar below the "Join the libervis.community here". You have too many blues there.

6) I see you've put a lot of effort building the Main Menu. It's actually not the standard menu supplied with the System module. My guess would be this is caused because of the need to have the hover effect. Hey! You can do that with the main menu too! That will save you from having to point your menu items to HTML pages that actually forward the user to the modules' indexes.

Cheers.