I have put off writing this for a while but I hope today being the day I could get some support and interest from the good people of bit-tech as its one of the communities I find myself involved in. About 5 months ago I thought I would make a website just to improve my knowledge a bit on web development as I knew literally nothing. I had numerous failures and dead ends but kept at it and I now reach a point where I have something I'm fairly happy with. I thought I would make it on something that actually interested me and something I was more passionate about. So I made this website based on gaming, movies, technology and entertainment/funny posts. I wanted it to be something you can kill a bit of time on if at work or just check up on to see what's new from around the world as well and get info when something is going mega cheap too in these areas. Like the other day the Nexus 7 (2012) was going for £99 at CPW - I bought it myself and I wanted to share it with other people that may have been interested. With the core elements of it up - I'm now faced with trying to raise some awareness on it but also get people involved if they share interests in this field. I thought I would stop by here to get your thoughts and critique on it but also hopefully your support as I progress it further. The website is here: http://www.gizhub.com Heres some screenshots - How it looks will vary depending on browser and settings: Gizhub.com screen 1 by Gizhub.com, on Flickr Gizhub.com Screenshot 4 by Gizhub.com, on Flickr Gizhub.com screen 3 by Gizhub.com, on Flickr Gizhub.com screen 2 by Gizhub.com, on Flickr Please take a look and share with me your opinions and thoughts! Also if you like the idea or the subject matter interests you I would be so very grateful if you hit the Facebook like button on the right on the homepage! This whole website is a work in progress but hitting the like button allows me to keep you up to date on new posts but also it allows me to try spread a wider net to reach more people. I thought I would post to see if theres anyone here that shares interests in either Gaming, Movies or Tech that would like to be a part of it? The way the site is designed is it allows me to source reviews from users! So although I may be unlikely to get my hands on the latest tech/game or watch the latest movie - some of you out there may do! And if you do you can posts your thoughts and reviews on the website sharing it with the world. It's all an experiment and I'm learning as I go really but I have some cool idea's I want to try out in the future - I went to The Business show in London on November 28th to learn a little about internet start ups and found it really interesting and I suppose I just wanted to share what I've made so far and hopefully get feedback but also more people on board too as I work on it. I'm looking at doing some entertaining Youtube videos next and I have a few ideas on that but I thought this could be a another small step sharing it with you and hopefully getting some support, Saj aka Solidus
Looks very nice to me, much better than my generic/boring wordpress blog I'm trying to do (see sig). I've never managed to be able to stick with web design whenever I've tried, it just ends up annoying me .
lmao haha yeah as in Gizmo or gadgets lol not what your thinking (Jizz? ha! ). I only realised the similarity after I purchased the domain and though "Oh for fu...sake"...then I actually thought it would probably be more memorable due to that after too and it grew on me - LOL.
I am still a complete n00b at it and just know the basics. It took a lot of mistakes, failures and time to get to this stage to make it this aesthetically nice. It does frustrate me too but I don't want to know anymore now that I got to this level. This will do for now!
You have the technical skill but I would say it's a bit flashy and cluttered. The swishy banner thing was fun for about 2 seconds then it was annoying me, not really a fan of all the different colors.
Hmm, I'll consider taking the slider off in this case. That was my fear too, that it would require people to scroll down just to get started on the content..hmm. Point taken.
I found that the slidy banner thing didn't load as quick as the rest of the stuff either, so I'd starting looking at the tiles, then the page would jump down when the slidy banner loaded in.
Just a personal oppinion. I don't like these tiles, don't like 'em in Win8 or WinPhone either. I'd prefer a more traditional layout, but again, that's just a very personal oppinion. The banner is very annoying, especially since it loads on the sub-pages aswell. And I'm not too fond of the facebook-thingy you got going there. Why should I wait for 10 seconds before I can read the article, just because I don't have a facebook-account? All that aside, the site works from a technical POV and that's an achievement allready, especially with all these gimmicks you've thrown in there. I wish you luck with your project, gicen that there's allready alot of sites covering the same kind of content as you're.
Hey, Yeah I think the whole tile effect is a something that's going to be down to preference as I've heard positives and negatives and many people do see the resemblance with the Windows tile effect. If you click on the movies tab at the top it switches to a different style of feed and sequential instead. I've tried to include both just to give people the best of both worlds; the tile effect allows me to fit more but then it will be a preference thing. Also sorry about the facebook pop-up thing - its something I'm testing and I think you must have visited the site just when I was fiddling it. Turning it off takes a few minutes due to having to purge the cache in my CDN and the site itself before it turns off. i must have forgot to do that on both so sometimes it pops up for visitors while I think its off for me. And yeah your right - theres loads of sites in this field - I suppose I wanted to make one without constant intrusive pop-ups and a more cleaner layout. I have a couple of other angles I'm thinking of taking the site in which I hope will make it a bit more different. I appreciate your feedback too, thx mate,
From a technical standpoint, during the few minutes I looked around everything seemed to work just fine. However, if you plan to make this into a serious long-term thing, then you need to settle on a more cohesive design style. One thing that struck me right off the bat is that the overall front page felt very cluttered. There was a lot of content - pictures, text, icons - and it was all moving around in different directions. My eye could not decide where to go. Related to that, I kept thinking that there was a color scheme (e.g. movie reviews are orange, game reviews are red, etc), but I'm not sure if that was actually the case. For example, I see that in the header links, 'TV Shows' has a dark blue highlight. Down in the content area, I see that TV show reviews have a small label that matches the header menu. However, the most dominant part of the tile is a dark yellow field of text. One option is to better organize the content and make it easily identifiable which content belongs to which category (sort of how bit-tech does it). The other option is to narrow down the type of content you want to serve. It's nice to be a one-size-fits-all web destination, but visitors are going to have to figure out why your broad approach is better than, say, the Yahoo! front page. By narrowing the type of content you provide, you can start building a following based on how you deliver that specific content. These are just a couple of things that occurred to me. I applaud you for sticking with it and getting to this point. I've always found that coming up with an overall layout was the hardest part. After that, it's all refinement and polishing. Well done on your first attempt.
I like it, I'll read some content when I have a bit more time. My only criticism would be the slider, 1. make the transition between the slides in the same across the board and maybe slow the transition down, 2. Make each image the full size of the slider, black borders look bad, gravity has a grey border similar to the background, 3. maybe add some form of title or description to the images, I understand GTA5 is a game, but what are you saying about it? Edit, I've only just noticed, why are the slider images not clickable?
Slight updates - Thanks for the feedback! Keep it coming! Wow lots of good points! I was hoping for this. Also please hit he Facebook like button on the right on the Homepage! It would take only a couple of seconds but allow me to keep you informed on updates etc as I work along the website! Theres 0 spam from my postings - only related material to what the websites about. Yeah this is likely to be an ongoing issue that's unlikely an easy fix as the slider loads usually at the end due to the way its coded. I have disabled the slider for all the other sections except the homepage - or do you think it needs to be taken off the homepage too? HIT THE LIKE BUTTON on first page please! Removed the facebook timer and updated the slider so it only loads on the homepage!* - Any other tips? Thanks again! - dont forget to HIT THE LIKE BUTTON on the homepage please! Hmm some very good points. The tile affect can be made into a excerpt listing instead if need be (check the movies and tv-show section to give you an idea) but I thought it looked too much like what other websites were doing? Do you think that would be better and worth the change?. The little category tags are color co-ordinated however the cover color isn't and manually chosen dependant on what your reviewing. I found when I did give everything set colors (Movies are red, tv-shows blue etc) what I found was if there was more of one topic posted recently it would actually look completely dominant in one color. I think its going to have to be something I revisit however as you may have a good point about filtering people into their desired interests. - Also if you wouldn't mind too much...HIT THE LIKE BUTTON on the homepage please! Hey Cookie! -I'll try improve the transitions - that may make the whole slider experience better and I think you may be onto something about slowing it down - it never even occurred to me that would probably make it much better! I'll give it a shot. ( Edit - I've slowed down the slider and had the loading tweaked - is this any better? ) -Yeah that's something that I will definitely need to do with resizing the images - it came down mainly to a time thing and cropping smaller pictures for a bigger slider proved to be something I skipped a little on the quality. I'll get back on it. The main problem I was having was if I made all the images the exact same size; some looked stretched to fit while others were "ok" therefore I had to try keep them proportionate to what they were originally so it didn't screw up the image too much stretching it and there was evidently some that were too small for the slider area hence the black background. I'll get working on it again however and see if I can tweak it as I think your right - the quality isn't there. - Oh and I've made the first image clickable (the last of us one) - il do the rest too! Took me a while to figure it out properly which was the main issue ! (I'm still a noob) and dont forget cookie to ...HIT THE LIKE BUTTON on the homepage please if you get a moment! =) - As above! Working on it! and as above if you get a sec hit the like button! so I can keep you up to date on the progress and how it develops!
