As someone browsing with a screen resolution of 1280x1024 pixels one of the first things that I notice when visiting AbsurdTrivia.com is that it seems a bit short and cornered to the left side of the screen. However, a redesign is planned which will focus on fixing this. With regards to that I can suggest fluid width design so the width of the site adapts to the screen resolution or browser size of the user.

Aside from that the color scheme of the site is pretty easy to look at, and somewhat diverse, combining blue gradients, black, gray, orange and light green. It seems to work alright, though maybe the light green elements could be made light orange, just to be a tad more consistent.

The logo is fuzzy (which seems deliberate and works well), cool and looks fairly brandable. However, the darker blue part of the background gradient makes the shadow and ".com" darker to discern from background. It may help if the darker end of the blue background gradient was made somewhat lighter.

The box just below the logo contains a prominent title and a brief description for each page. This is a nice touch, but it could be put besides the logo rather than below it, making the overall design much neater, especially in combination with a wider (perhaps fluid) width of the site.

Homepage neatly displays the top lists of trivia, however it seems somewhat disingenuous to have the space below the user menu on the right sidebar empty while the google advert is placed below the fold in a box. Just like the sub pages, an ad could reside in the sidebar.

Main menu looks good and works fine, leading to all the major types of trivia available on the site. Each section then allows browsing further by sub-categories, except the sub-categories of "TV shows", "Movies" and "Celebrities" are called "groups" and also allow browsing alphabetically. Also, only "TV Shows", "Movies" and "General" sections have a description in a green box while others don't. This seems a bit inconsistent. Alphabetical browsing and descriptions should probably be available in either all or none of the sections.

Each sub-category contains a "share this quiz category" block that allows the visitor to bookmark it in a browser or a social network, email a friend about it or grab a widget to put on your blog. The widget's colors and size can be customized. This is a great thing to have. Sub-category pages also have a "Browse back to" navigational pager which helps to know the hierarchical location of the page being viewed.

Trivia quiz listings (like this example) are easy to read and display the number of questions, difficulty and rating which helps the user make a quicker choice of what to try. The actual quiz page displays further interesting statistics. All quizzes appear to have both a standard version that doesn't require any plugins and a flash version, which is an excellent touch for those who might not have a working flash plugin or just prefer standard html.

I took one of the quizzes and it was enjoyable, (albeit it shows I need to brush up on my trek knowledge ;) ). One thing I would suggest is to make the score image much smaller and more compact, or perhaps offer multiple sizes. This way it is more likely that more people will embed them on their personal pages and blogs.

What is also great about AbsurdTrivia.com is that a user can also create their own trivia to add to the library. This requires registration, which is as easy as most sites' registration process. One minor complaint I do have though is that the registration page doesn't hide the password as it is typed.

Registered users gain access to the quiz manager where they can add and manage their own quizzes. It contains a link to the quiz creation manual. Each category of AbsurdTrivia.com contains a button that leads to the process of creating a quiz. It can be added to the current category or a new category can be searched for. Then the quiz title, description and player notes can be specified upon which the quiz is ready for adding questions. Four types of questions can be added, multiple choice, true/false, yes/no and an ordered list. This process is pretty straightforward and should make it really easy to create a new quiz.

Finally, the footer looks somewhat poor. The copyright notice could use a smaller font and a higher top padding (as well as perhaps, a change from the year display from "2007" to "2007 - 2009" assuming the site was started in 2007).

Design wise, AbsurdTrivia.com is a pretty well designed site aside from the issues mentioned, which when fixed will make it truly solid. It may not be quite smashing in terms of eye candy, but it's fairly simple and most importantly functional. This gives it a more than a passing rating.

Design rating: 7/10

Focus:

When the name "Absurd Trivia" is first heard it may make one conclude it is about a specific kind of trivia which is in some sense absurd. On the other hand it could simply refer to the triviality of the subject matter. Whatever the case may be, the sub title, description and main menu evident on the homepage sets things straight and makes it clear that this is about all kinds of trivia. Deep categorization, especially of TV shows and movies makes it easy for one to find exactly the kind of trivia wanted, and if that doesn't help the search box comes to the rescue (which is how I found the star trek trivia). Deep categorization also makes it easier for people to find what they want on search engines.

That said there really isn't much to complain about here. It's hard to get lost on this site.

Focus rating: 10/10

Content:

It would be nice if the site included a statistics block in the sidebar displaying how many of the trivia quizzes there actually are on the site. While I've encountered some categories with only very few trivia, judging from how many categories there are and the fact that I could easily find (using the search box) much of what I searched for suggests that there is plenty of quizzes to take. In fact, this site could probably entertain you for hours.

Speaking of content, the introduction on the homepage could use some polishing. There are a few apparent grammatical errors which could impair the perception of professionalism, such as "we'll" instead of "well", though the sentence in question might do well even without that word (leaving only "Absurd Trivia is packed full of them."). "Want to play a quiz on the sitcom "Friends" could be a separate question sentence, followed by the rhetorical answer after it. This may seem like nitpicking, but the idea is to convey the message in a professionally sounding way, so the criticism is well intentioned. Aside from that, the introduction text still does its job.

Another notable complaint is that once the user creates a new quiz, the link to the manual inside the quiz manager no longer displays, even though some people may still want to consult it for any reason. It may be prudent to have it still display somewhere.

Content rating: 8/10