Design of HowToConvert.org is certainly shiny and full of eye candy with transparencies, rounded corners and a beautiful blue splash in the header. It looks like it's floating on top of a glass plate or with some stretch of the imagination a glass table surface. Transparency style reminds a bit of panels in modern operating systems such as Windows Vista, Windows 7, OS X and KDE4 desktops. In any case a pleasant it's pretty and pleasant.

The sidebar looks pretty good as well with its soothing light blue background color, style of block titles and bullet point icons for links to recent posts. I also quite like the rounded search box. Main content area is stylish as well mostly due to the light shadowy background of teasers and the TV icon. But this is where some issues come to the fore.

The TV icon is on the very edge of the background border and there's unused empty space to the left of the teaser text. My guess is this is where teaser image would be if it was available, which would be great if they were on every teaser. Otherwise, that white space should probably be filled by the teaser so that the title and teaser are aligned which would look much neater.

Article pages could use some fixing as well. The light shadow frame is visible at the end of each article where the text ends up displaying on its borders rather than within them and the text overall seems a little too close to the edge of the white area making it feel a little crammed.

Aside from that a lot of articles are really badly disrupted by two square ads displaying within them, often positioned on top of each other. When I look at these ads and what they do to content I almost see them as some kinds of big blobs that clog the natural flow of content. For example, this one is really clogged. Square ads are positioned in such a way as to make a barrier between the beginning and the rest of the article. You probably don't need to take my word for it as it's quite possible some users might find this way of showing ads rather obnoxious.

Probably the best looking thing on article pages is the comment form.

Design Rating: 7/10

Focus:

The focus of HowToConvert.org is obviously on providing tutorials on how to convert one thing to another. Specifically, judging from content available, but also as may be expected, it's about various technological conversions from one digital format of music or video to another. It wouldn't be a bad idea to have an about page explicitly outlining the purpose and focus on digital conversion though.

Focus Rating: 10/10

Content:

Tutorials on HowToConvert.org typically start with a description of the involved formats and their properties and then continues with three short sections; "things you will need", "instructions" and "do's (or don'ts)" which are set up as simple bullet lists. Instructions are a numbered list of steps to follow in order to complete the conversion. This makes these articles quite brief, but useful and easy to follow. The introductory text however in some cases could be split into two or more paragraphs as it looks like a wall of text, especially if squeezed in by ads.

There's overall 23 articles available which isn't bad, but isn't a terribly large number either. But then again if it's only digital conversions that are being covered there's only so many of the conversions people may typically be looking for.

Content Rating: 8/10