TechiesGuide.com presents us with a simple, elegant and sharp look with a color scheme combining gray, black and red. Logo is relatively simplistic, but put in an elegant and memorable way with "Guide" made in bold and italic emphasis on keywords in the slogan. Any improvements that could be made are a matter of polish and perfecting the site's design for a bit of an extra edge.

Perhaps most notable of improvement opportunities is with regards to the right sidebar of the main content frame, where popular posts and recent comments are displayed. It pushes the content teasers to the left leaving them less width to fill up and causes a little too much white space below it. I would suggest removing this sidebar and putting popular posts and recent comments into the main right sidebar.

In the main sidebar "latest guides" and "guide categories" blocks seem redundant since the homepage teasers already display some latest guides and the main menu displays categories already. Removing both or one of them would make enough space for popular posts and recent comments avoiding extending the sidebar too long by merging the popular posts and recent comments into it.

After this change the teasers of recent posts in the main content area will display in full width, much like they're displayed on category pages and align nicely with the "recent from.." blocks below it.

Regarding the article pages I would suggest changing the google ad to use a matching or similar color scheme as the rest of the site so it blends in better. Also, if there are images within the article they might look better if centered rather than aligned to the left. Other than that the styling of articles is quite good and comments look great.

Design Rating: 9/10

Focus:

Fortunately, the domain name and title of the site use key words which easily convey its purpose on first sight. Slogan is especially encouraging: An Ingenious Guide For Every Techie. That's got to be a winner. Of course, as essentially a guide to all things tech the topic is quite broad, but the categories narrow it down to a few more specific topics; databases, java, malware, mobile telephony, multimedia, networking and privacy.

There is also an about page which explains precisely the focus of the site and its highlights and introduces us to its content.

Focus Rating: 10/10

Content:

Aside from a pleasant design and a good focus presentation, content is the key to TechiesGuide.com and the about page introduces us to the kind of content we'll be reading in an engaging and encouraging way, promising the content to be "original, unique, novel, simple and understandable even by an ordinary individual" and even offering to write articles by request.

Given that the site is still fairly new there are only seventeen articles so far. However they are packed with useful information, written to be relatively brief and to the point, using subsections to denote points of interest and often also using bullet points, step by step instructions and even examples where applicable.

The use of font style variation is quite effective as well, namely special font style for code and use of bold text for subsections and emphasis. This makes articles seem more interesting and attractive. Not all articles use emphasis as much as the others, but it's a trend I can only encourage. The outline of articles adapts to the subject matter providing for the efficient presentation of relevant information.

In other words articles seem to be delivering on the promise made in the about page. After reading a few articles I was easily able to understand what it's trying to say and even learn a few things. Most articles seem understandable even to those who aren't very tech savvy while some have a more specific audience who probably have some background experience, such as the article in the database section about stored procedures.

All of this makes it hard to provide a better suggestion aside from "keep at it". It goes without saying that more content should be added and if it's of as good quality as the ones so far it should make TechiesGuide.com into a valuable resource, albeit there is plenty of competition. I would certainly encourage continued use of emphasis, sections and subsections, bullet points and especially images and illustrations, perhaps even more so than in current articles.

Content Rating: 10/10