An honest first impression of ExpertsForge.com is that of a professional and pleasantly colored, but slightly cluttered web site. We get a largely symmetrical header with a professional stylish logo, buttons and a search box combined with a relatively simplistic menu. But this is where some problems are noticeable. That search box covers the "le" in Google logo and leans right to the drop down menu to the right so it seems crammed in there despite the fact that it should fit in the area on which it resides. There is also a somewhat similar issue with the login form as the "go" button is pushed off the edge of the site.

Moving further down from the header things are fairly smooth even though it looks like a long list of stuff. The first block of the right sidebar ("featured authors") starts lower down the sidebar than its equivalent in the left sidebar ("categories") which slightly detracts from the neat symmetrical look. Also judging from some of the titles in the left sidebar it seems that if the sidebar was only a few pixels wider all titles would fit in a single line rather than breaking to the second one.

Clicking on a category for a category page reveals one good thing and one bad thing. The bad is the ad which is put above all the listings and even seems to masquerade under a title of its own "Application Tutorials" even though it doesn't list anything from the site, just a square adsense ad. There is another title below it "Latest Tutorials on Applications" which is apparently about the same thing. This seems to reflect a rather indiscreet advertising policy. The good thing however is how the right sidebar is used for subcategories (which are many) which makes sure that this particularly important part of navigation remains fully above the fold.

On the article pages the same issue with ads remains; two squares before the article content even begins in addition to the link ad unit below the article and a yet another square before the comment form. If it wasn't for such blatant ad positioning I'd have no complaints about the article page except that a larger font should be used for section titles, especially when there is a situation like this where the section title ("background") is just as bold as the first sentences of the section, making it indistinguishable. A heading tag would be more appropriate for any titles or subtitles (such as h3).

Design Rating: 7/10

Focus:

Given my experience sites with "expert" in the name for some reason always have something to do with information technology and computers. Same is true here and the slogan makes this clearer: "Internet's Top IT Resource Zone". I would assume experts are not just the people behind the site's content, but also the target audience of the site. Otherwise the term "IT" might be a little too tech savvy. That's as far as it goes in terms of explaining the site's purpose though. The rest are categories and actual articles.

An about page may be quite useful here however, especially for explaining how exactly does the site work and what types of content can be found. Further inspection of content reveals it to be somewhat like a community forum more so than a repository of articles as it may first appear. Clarifying this beyond any doubt would be quite useful.

Focus Rating: 8/10

Content:

There are many categories and subcategories, albeit not all of them have content. Not all content are articles and it is general split into three types: tutorials, solutions and questions though both solutions and questions seem to be about questions whereas only tutorials tend to be presented as more full sized articles. This is actually probably typical for this type of site. It's more like a community forum of experts sharing information (again, something to be clarified in the about page).

That said, there seems to be plenty of tutorials of varying quality which may be immediately useful, and the ability to ask questions and perhaps have them answered within the members area is a useful service as well.

Content Rating: 8/10