Sitecritic.net Website Reviews – How can your website be improved?

Form

The layout is pretty straight forward with 2 columns and main navigation on the left. The navigation is simple, effective and idiot proof. The homepage looks cool but I don’t think it is convincing enough to arouse my interest. The homepage should provide a glimpse of what the entire website can really offer. Perhaps adding more description and images to the news might be a good idea. I also feel that the “Free Newsletter” section should go down because it is less important.

The left menu leads to 4 main categories in the site, ie free templates, free images, free icons and guestbook. The layout of each category is also very simple. For example under the template section, you only see thumbnail display of the web templates. Though I would like to see more description of the thumbnails, the idea of “keeping it simple” may just work here.

Some of the listing in the category page might be too long and take up alot of bandwidth. For example under the “Free Images” section , the author might consider splitting up the thumbnails into different pages. I think this step is important especially when the database gets bigger.

The colors used in the site are soothing and pleasing to the eye. However, the adsense in the header seems to be a distraction and out of place. I am not a fan of putting adsense in the header especially for content-based sites because the eyes will be focusing on the body. It might therefore be a better idea to integrate it into the body, something like what about.com has done.

Function

The only serious problem I have with the site is the lacking of a footer. To me, every webpage tells a story with the header as introduction, body as content and footer as ending or conclusion. After scrolling down to the end, I might think that the page is suddenly chipped off due to scripting error or some unknown reason.

Conclusion

Inoxfire is definitely a cool site with strength in its navigation, simplicity and free content. Though the idea is not new, it is still a great way to generate traffic. People love freebies. If the site can be updated regularly with quality images and templates, it is sure to get popular in the near future. The biggest challenge for Inoxfire is perhaps to let people know about the site.