Enlightr.com manages to pull of a pretty impressive feat with its design. Main menu animates on highlights and blocks smoothly change color brightness on hover all without using flash. Everything is presented with its own color, a shiny icon and rounded corners giving the site a cheerfully positive atmosphere.

Layout is also pretty functional. The homepage was dedicated to introducing people to the site and listing top content in each category. The menu area includes a main menu that links to the essentials (blog, articles, all content, forum and subscribe page) and a prominent category menu each with own icon, although the content menu also contains a drop down with those same categories. In any case this helps quickly get to available content of interest.

The header area sports an attractive logo, login and search boxes and a smaller menu with a date, and FAQ, contact, register and friend recommendation links. If not for the FAQ and recommend links this might have been better suitable for the footer.

The blog and article sections have a rather large space filled only by the google ads and an image presenting special content features (such as Motivational Mondays). There might be a more space efficient way of doing this. One (but probably not the only) possibility is slightly reducing the size of the round image and putting it at the top of the sidebar, and reducing the google ad block to a simple banner or leaderboard. Same would apply to the articles overview box in the articles section.

Blog posts are presented neatly, with the post date, author and tags beneath the title in their own container. However the articles section doesn't quite follow that standard and could still use some improvements in style. The author, categories and star ratings could be put in their own container just below the title with the author and category beneath each other on the left of the container and the rating on the right. Something like this:

The three part footer area is a nice touch, displaying who is online and making the frequently asked questions and sign up page easily accessible throughout the site.

Considering that the site is still in development excellent progress has been made and design looks more than promising.

Design rating: 9/10

Focus:

Homepage is almost entirely dedicated to telling the visitor what the site is about and what its focus is. The site name, logo and tag line along with certain design elements such as the images presenting "motivational mondays", "time saving tuesdays" etc. make the picture complete. The site does a good job at conveying its purpose and attracting first time visitor's attention. It worked for me.

Focus rating: 10/10

Content:

This is a winner, not only because there is already plenty of useful content to read, but because of the various intriguing and innovative approaches taken towards presenting. Registered users gain points just for reading an article and are able to gain even more by contributing. With enough points they can even become the editors themselves. This provides a fair bit of incentive, especially for those passionate about self improvement and having something to share.

It doesn't end there though. The site also offers a quick overview of its articles called "on the run summary" so those who are in a hurry or just want to skim can have a quick rundown on what the article is about, albeit articles themselves don't usually go too long.

A blog has its own special feature too; every day is designated to a special type of topic so there is a "motivation monday", "time saving tuesday", "Why is that!? Wednesday", "thought throwing tuesday", "link finding friday" and "seduction sunday". This ought to leave readers anticipating the day for their favorite topic or returning every day for full coverage.

Content itself is pretty straightforward to follow and if I may add a bit of explicit subjectivity, it has already been helpful to me personally. I'm a sucker for self improvement and this site does an awesome job. :)

Content rating: 10/10