BestInLife.net greets us with a fresh and somewhat shiny look thanks to the cool blue color scheme and a gentle glow behind the shiny and somewhat futuristic looking site title. The overall first impression is that of a clean clutter free web site showing you no surplus of unnecessary information. The sidebar has just what one might expect, a search box, categories and a tag cloud. The main content area starts with a spotlight of an article with a wide image helping make the homepage more attractive, continuing with two columns of teaser blocks, some with and some without an image and finishing with a display of popular and random articles.

So what could be improved? Most of the issues are relatively minor and would only add to the already quite clean design. Let's start from the top.

The adsense ad box at the top of the sidebar clashes a bit with the gradient on the left. The best solution would be to make the background of adsense transparent, but google doesn't have that option so the remaining solution is to increase the left margin to about 40 or 45 pixels which will reduce the clash and to make it perfect decrease the width of the gradient between the main content area and the sidebar. While we're at adsense, it might be a good idea to match up the colors of adsense titles and description to the equivalent on the rest of the site. So titles would be light blue (#1D75CF) and description text would be gray (#84878E). It's just an idea that might make adsense blend in a little better making it seem as a part of actual content, even while the "Ads by Google" note still makes it clear it's an ad. Who knows, it might result in more clicks. :)

Moving on, there are a few slight margin issues. At the top article spotlight box actually touches the header area. It would probably be better if it had a margin-top of around 10 pixels. The same issue exists between the pager below all teaser boxes and a block displaying popular and random articles. A margin of around 10 pixels would help there as well.

Titles in teaser boxes are cut off and since I've seen a similar theme before I think it's just a characteristic of the theme that might be worth fixing. I can't help but think that cut off titles are a bit of an usability issue. If titles would be too long if they weren't cut off there may be a few work arounds such as making the titles smaller and making sure margins and/or paddings put them, even as long as they may be, neatly in the top center area with enough line height and spaced out from the description just enough to still look good. Speaking of teaser box styling, not all of them have an image thumbnail impairing consistency a bit.

And here's one final nitpick as far as homepage or sitewide elements are concerned. The XHTML validation button has a border and these kinds of buttons usually look far better without it.

Moving on finally to the content view, the only complaint I have is the article font color and size compared to the font color and size of the google ad box embedded in the article. The adsense font is bigger and darker and therefore makes the actual content seem meager in comparison. The problem is further exacerbated by the left margin between the article text and the ad box being a little too low. What would fix this is either making the article font bigger and darker or making the adsense font smaller and lighter, mainly the description text. Adsense allows adjusting the font size and they have an option for "small".

Other than that I would suggest making the embedded media where available centered rather than left aligned and perhaps making the section titles bigger by using html headings (h2 or h3) instead of html strong tag. Other stuff is quite alright, especially that nice tabbed widget with recent posts, bookmarking buttons and tags.

Design Rating: 8/10

Focus:

"Best In Life" suggests quite an open ended topic especially given the arguable subjectivity of "best". :) There is however an about page which explains the purpose quite well and puts it into the right context. All articles are about what is "the best" and there are also specific categories which articles can be browsed by. In any case the name of the site, its explanation and content seem to be quite consistent and relevant to each other.

Focus Rating: 10/10

Content:

We are offered nearly 100 articles in 20 categories all about the best things of a particular kind, from five best commercials of all time to best way of losing weight to best time to plant strawberries. Most articles, judging from the tag cloud, are about food and food recipes which probably isn't surprising because food is such an important part of life and what makes it good. :)

Articles are generally not too long (or quite brief) and contain multiple sections titled in bold which helps readability. Overall I think BestInLife.net has a bunch to offer and I suspect the amount of content is gonna grow.

Content Rating: 10/10