First impressions of HowToUse.org are quite pleasant. It's clean, shiny, smooth and colorful with nice thumbnail images for each article and no obnoxious advertising to ruin it. Logo is a little simplistic, but still stylish and attractive, thanks to slightly different colors of the words displayed without spaces.

There is one little miss on the homepage; the second article displayed is missing its thumbnail image ("How to Use a Pressure Cooker"). Also, the three dots after each title seem unnecessary.

I have only a few minor additional complaints with regards to site wide elements. The "How to use WI-FI" link in the main menu on the topmost black bar seems a little out of context. I tried refreshing and going to other pages to see if it perhaps changes randomly to another article each time, but it stays fixed. Secondly, given that the main orange menu already displays categories, displaying them again in the categories area of the sidebar might not be necessary. At least it's something to keep in mind if adding anything extra to the sidebar in the future so as to avoid adding clutter.

Article pages look quite good and elegant except the size of the section titles seems a little exaggerated. They might look better if the font size of the h2 tag was reduced to around 18px rather than 27px as it is now. One other thing to be noticed on article pages is that the image that displays as a thumnail in teaser on the category pages don't display, yet they might add a little extra attractiveness to the article itself. I suggest adding the image to float top left or top right to the article content.

Design Rating: 9/10

Focus:

The domain name and site title are meant to convey the purpose of HowToUse.org directly. What is covered by these how to articles is shown in the main orange menu corresponding to categories of content as well as a sample of guides displayed on the homepage. All of this leaves pretty much no doubts and prompts the user to check out the content.

Focus: 10/10

Content:

HowToUse.org offers seven categories of nearly seventy articles most of which (around 50) in the computers category which currently make this site most attractive to those looking to learn how to use something on a computer. Second most filled category is "technology" which also contains a featured tutorial on how to use an iPod Nano. What's good about the articles here is that they're presented in a consistent outline of sections and use list form to present information. Sections are "things you will need", "instructions" and "do's and don'ts". This makes them quite easy to follow.

If there's anything to complain about it may be the necessity to fill out the rest of the categories better, but that's probably going to be done as the site grows.

Content Rating: 10/10