Fresh, cool and perhaps even somewhat futuristic Who Invented It dot net looks quite appealing. The header has some simple eye candy in form of a blue background gradient and white and shadowed title written in a modern soft font type. The smooth shift between blue and gray adds it that bit of futuristic feel as these two colors are typically used to create futuristic settings. After all, inventions are a big part of what makes our future what it is.

I also like the rounded corners at the bottom.

The upper part of the main white area contains a nice horizontal menu on gray gradient background with white round tabs on hover. All categories fit nicely into this bar except one which is ironically "uncategorized". Perhaps it doesn't need to be displayed here or could be removed and move content in it to other categories. Otherwise it does ruin the horizontal menu experience a bit.

There aren't many other issues, just a few imperfections. Some titles and teasers in teaser blocks are cut off, sometimes in the middle of the word or sentence. There seems to be a little too much space in teaser blocks as well below the "read more" link.

The site could also use a search box which would probably best be positioned on the right of the white bar above the horizontal menu containing the "home" link. Other than that I'm hard pressed to find other suggestions to make. Perhaps there could be less ads within content (like just one square box instead of two especially where the second one seems out of place next to the "share and enjoy" widgets), but unlike some other similar sites I reviewed they're a little less problematic in these articles. While this site also appears to be based on an existing theme some of the other sites I've seen use, it seems to be much more customized and thus appears much more unique. For this type of site it also seems to be working quite well.

Design Rating: 9/10

Focus:

WhoInventedIt.com is another simple content site with obvious self-explanatory name and titles. It's called "Who Invented It" and all of its article titles follow a "who invented x" format. I hardly need to say anything more so I'll just throw in a usual "it's never a bad idea to add an about page with some highlights and introduction" advice. There, I just did. :)

Focus Rating: 10/10

Content:

As far as the amount goes this site isn't lacking. There's whole of 234 articles to sift through, all about who invented what. Articles don't just tell you who invented it however, they also tell quite a bit more about the invention, its significance and history and other details in well written, but still not overly long winded articles. Inventions covered are also not limited only to technologies and specific material products, but a lot more including sports, professions and various cultural traditions.

If you're wondering about who invented something there's a good chance WhoInventedIt.com has it covered. It does need a search box however, as mentioned in the design section!

Content Rating: 10/10

It might sound odd, but what catches my attention most on this site is it's title/header. It has a simple, but professional and stylish look and seems to fit right in place and to the background on which it resides. The rest of the site, however, is a little more like business as usual - a pleasant looking theme with a modified color scheme, but in this instance without teaser images and other eye catching goodies.

The color scheme mentioned is fairly conservative; black-gray with a bit of red. Reviewing other elements of the design gets me back to some of the observations I made for other sites using this theme. In short, teaser titles and text are cut off (sometimes in mid-word), search box could be put on the bar with the home link to free up header space and the pager on teaser listing pages could be adapted to the site's color scheme. These might seem like minor issues, but here they are.

On the article page there is a typical issue with ads, but since WhereDoes.org has a bit longer articles the two square ads seem to do a little less of a disruption and fit in better.

If I were ask for the biggest suggestion I could make regarding this site's design I would say: make it more unique and less like a theme that's been seen before. Of course, that is not to bash the design as it is from a simple usability point of view. Whether it looks similar to other sites or not does not indeed matter if it works. And yes, it does work, at least if the goal isn't to impress people with design (but rather content, presumably). There could be improvements, as mentioned, but it works.

Design Rating: 7/10

Focus:

WhereDoes.org is one of those sites with a name that sounds like an unfinished sentence, but it is that which makes its focus clear. Finish the sentence and you know all about what this site is supposed to offer. And chances are that by finishing the sentence you may have just spelled out the title of one of the articles published in it. This kind of strategy makes it hard to find any kind of a focus related fault as the site is pretty much an axis between its title and its content so there's no room for wavering.

While there could be various types of "where does" questions to ask it seems that all of the articles currently available on WhereDoes.org are about where do certain people live and categories apparently represent areas of these people's activity. An about page could be a useful mean to making this explicit as well as explain or affirm the reasons why this kind of content may be useful..

Focus Rating: 10/10

Content:

As mentioned all content on WhereDoes.org is about where do some people live and there is in fact 50 articles on this topic, that is to say, you can find out where do 50 of the well known people live, from Tom Cruise to Bill Gates to Paris Hilton. I have some doubts as to the usefulness of this information, but I can understand its "trivia" value and satisfying some casual curiosity.

However, this isn't all that these articles offer. After all there wouldn't be a need for articles if it was, but rather a simple database of addresses or locations. Articles on WhereDoes.org expand on the location information with a fairly comprehensive, albeit not too long winded, description of said persons, their career, properties they own and so on - a feast for those who like to track the lives of celebrities.

As such I suppose it has some entertainment value, at least, and might be a way to find a little bit more about the famous people than is typically known which I suppose can't be a bad thing. Overall, it's an interesting resource.

Content Rating: 10/10