How can this site improve? What is really irritating about it?

Question

http://www.chizeng.com/nhd/

I'm submitting it for competition soon and any suggestions would greatly help! Please give me some "real" criticism instead of... like... "It looks good already."

Answer 1

I agree with the previous respondent about the animated flames. It might seem "cool" but actually it's an old-fashioned kind of gimmick that is over-used now. If you feel strongly about keeping it, at least match the red color with that used elsewhere on the site.

The contrast should be increased on the red headers. They don't stand out enough from the blue background and so are not very legible. I suggest you make them white to match your "Triumph & Tragedy" tagline.

Try putting equal amounts of padding to the top of the images as you have put on the right margins. Currently the images are bumping up against the dotted line above.

The 3D effect on your vertical separator line is kind of old fashioned also, and doesn't go with the rest of your site (nothing else on the site has a 3d effect). Why not make them plain white, like the border around your rotating banner graphic at the top?

Also as another respondent said, if you decrease the padding on the left side a bit, your site will fit in a 1024x768 window without a horizontal scrollbar.

Answer 2

1. It's too wide

2. It doesn't line up properly in Firefox 1.5

3. It has a JavaScript resize function in your page load, which is very annoying

4. It uses tables for layout, which is against the XHTML standard.

5. The sitemap is an image. That totally defeats the purpose of a sitemap, which is supposed to be in text only.

6. It makes extensive use of copyrighted images, for which I doubt you have obtained permission to use.

7. The text contains no citations or attribution, which borders on plagiarism at worse and casts question on the accuracy of the content at best.

8. You embedded an autoplay audio file on the images page, which is really offensive. And again, I doubt you obtained permission to use the song, which is copyrighted; since it resides on your Web site, you're stealing it.

9. It's clearly slanted toward a pro-American view of the matter. How you couldn't have a pro-American view about 9-11 if you're an American is beyond me, but "The Source of Evil," "America Under Attack," "A Nation United" and the like leaves no doubt about your bias; neither does your text.

All that said, if you correct the sizing and position issues, it's fairly pretty; it's well-organized, too.

Answer 3

1. The burning letters need to go.
2. Triumph or Tragedy should replace them
3. Try to eliminate the horizontal scroll bar
4. The Sitemap link is irrelavent, the site is very small
5. Reduce the size of the pictures

Answer 4

Drop the flaming letters.

A) they NEVER look good
B) might be considered to be in poor taste

Answer 5

looks kinda crappy, maybe not enough content