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

Here we have a decent blue themed web site with a relatively professional look. There is a simple, round but fairly effective logo with some binary numbers riding on top left of it. I could imagine this being animated so the binary numbers keep circling the "TB" circle.

There is a sense of consistency across the design. For instance, the main menu in the header and the categories menu in the sidebar are both round, only with inverted colors to fit the background. The content areas and the sidebar also feature rounded corners. Titles of article teasers on the homepage have a blue background matching the main menu background in the header.

However, there are some immediately visible rough edges which testify of the need to apply some tuning. The most obvious is the fact that the above a big square ad is displaying above all content on the main column of the homepage which is a practice that can send a wrong message to the reader. Content should always be in the spotlight, not ads. Ads could also be styled to more closely fit the color scheme (instead of using google default) so that they fit in better.

At least on Firefox 3, input boxes for search and login and the drop down box for language selection seem to be too wide making them extend beyond the width of the sidebar they're set on. A teaser with a huge Internet Explorer icon jumps off a little too much from the rest of the teasers. It would be a good idea for each of them to have a same-sized teaser image instead or none. It's also not clear what the teasers on the homepage represent, but it doesn't appear to be all recent content of the site since there are only two pages worth of them and there are many more articles in the categories. Is it featured content? Whatever it may be it might be a good idea to have some sort of a headline saying it.

When clicked some categories reveal sub menus which display as a bullet list of normal links, but the bottom margin could be a little larger so it doesn't almost touch the next menu item.

The language flags on category pages and the homepage seem a little redundant given that there already is a "Select Language" drop down in the left sidebar. If they're gonna be displayed however they might fit better within the header area either at the very top right or at the far right of the main menu strip. Alternatively it could be at the top of the left sidebar. If it wont be displayed then the top of the right sidebar, or at least just below the search box, would be a good place to move the language selection drop down menu.

Article pages are fairly good, but certain shorter articles or pages just briefly describing a particular subject, such as this one end up terribly ad ridden. Ads end up taking far more space than content. Larger font size of the article content is a good thing though.

TopBits.com also has other sections aside from what appears to be main content many of which appear to be using a special integrated software module. Blogs look a little bare right now with only one blog available. Forums are also empty and their theme seems a little troubled with "New Topic" and "New Poll" buttons displaying below each other and crossing into the first forum header and having the "jump" drop down menu crammed between stats and "online" information (which seems redundant given the stats above).

There is also a glossary with a fairly decent look consistent with the rest of the site except it loses the sidebars on the page of a specific term in the glossary. It also has the same issue as the homepage with the square ad displaying above all content. Games section looks decent as well, but could use some work on buttons like "leaderboard", "newest games" etc. The green hover color on links doesn't fit their background too well and they could use a somewhat larger padding to look neater.

Chat section isn't integrated to the design and the search section isn't loading (though it's unclear why it's necessary if there already is a search box on the sidebar, at least on homepage.

All things considered it's a decent albeit not wow inspiring design, but needs some polish in few places and some attention to the blog, forums and perhaps the chat section if the idea is to integrate it to the rest of the site's design.

Design Rating: 7/10

Focus:

On a first impression it actually isn't entirely clear what this site represents. "Top Bits" is short and sweet, but if you miss the meaning of "bits" you'll have to scour the categories to get the hint of it as a tech resource of some kind. After plowing through all sections I figure it's a relatively large technology resource built with an intention to build a community around it. In any case an about page or an introduction of some kind would really do good here.

Focus Rating: 6/10

Content:

Content is among the strongest elements of TopBits.com albeit it doesn't seem so at the first glance of the homepage given the lack of clarity as to what kind of content is the homepage meant to show and only two pages available. The richness is in the categories listed at the top of the left sidebar as well as in the glossary. Plowing through main categories I could estimate over 3300 entries. Some of them might not be full articles as certain entries are just brief descriptions of a subject, but that's still quite a lot. Glossary contains over 650 terms defined judging from the number of pages and terms per page.

So as far as quantity is concerned there's definitely a lot to offer. Regarding quality it's difficult judge an entire collection, but there seems to be a relatively diverse offering of articles some of which are quite comprehensive. It seems to be covering everything a techie might have an interest in, from basic information such as definition to detailed guides with examples and bullet points.

The weak points, of course, are the blog (nearly empty) and forums (empty, despite what the mysterious counter of the last forum says). However these could be late additions and not primary to the site so they shouldn't count for much at this point.

Content Rating: 10/10