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

HowToTransfer.com sports a simple, but quite modern and pleasing design. Header almost doesn't exist except for a lone home button and the search box whose input field is only faintly visible on that dark brown background.

There is no actual logo, just a "How To" title at the top of the sidebar with a nice red gradient for a background which almost looks like a polished fragment of red painted metal or plastic peaking from beneath the white board that is the main content area. Red color scheme combined with brown and white seems quite sharp and works really good.

The categories block in the sidebar also seems unnecessary given that it only displays the "uncategorized" category.

The main content area presents latest articles decorated with engaging images and a nice catching "read more" button. However the size of those titles might be a little too big making most titles jump to the second line of text. Reducing it to about 24 pixels with perhaps a bold font weight might make it look more elegant without ruining the emphasis that they require.

The view of actual articles on their own pages is a little less inspiring. The image is no longer visible, unlike in the teaser while the ads typically end up eating up quite a bit of content space on shorter articles making for quite an obnoxious intrusion. Titles of sections within the articles also seem a little too big and where they take up two lines the line height doesn't seem sufficient creating some overlap in text display between two lines.

A special graphic for bullets in lists is a nice touch, but the background color in the graphic doesn't appear to match the white background of the page therefore making the graphics look like blocks with a rounded button inside rather than just the nice button itself.

It might also be notable that the design is already seen elsewhere as a theme which is merely modified slightly in terms of the color scheme. It's not unreasonable to make at least a token suggestion or a comment towards putting a little more effort into at least further customizations of the theme or fixing of the above mentioned issues that come with it or at most doing a more thorough redesign that will make the site's design stand more on its own.

On the other hand.. it may simply be that the site is there to just show the keyword rich content, sell the ads and be done with it. I suppose it depends on the publisher's goals.

Design Rating: 7/10

Focus:

The name of this site is practically an unfinished sentence, but that could be a feature. In any case it is suggestive of the purpose of the site albeit not precisely of its focus. Apparently there is no focus other than on showing people how to transfer whatever can be transfered in whichever context, from transferring files from device to device to transferring money between bank accounts using various methods. Well, actually, all content on the site so far is precisely in one of these two categories, with the tech related transfers being more dominant.

What gives these kinds of sites a way out is always precisely this undeniable obvious link between their name and the type of content available which is evident from their titles themselves. In truth however these kinds of sites are built to serve one type of keyphrase on search engines and isn't in any way designed to attract people through the homepage and keep them for long. This makes it hard not to give a good rating, but with a strange taste of reviewing a site that's been produced half automatically as if on factory line. Regardless, I stand by my typical suggestion. Having an about page or an introduction or some other marketing material to show the highlights and spell out the purpose is always a good thing as it shows that the publisher cares.

Focus Rating: 9/10

Content:

Well, there's 22 articles mostly about transferring files from device to device or other transfer related uses of technology and transferring of money with most content being about technology related transfers. They're typically quite short and tell you what you need and provide step by step instructions to what you should do to complete the transfer. Some have a final "Do" section with what you have to keep in mind or a link to related content.

Given that information conveyed is almost strictly procedural this brief form is probably a good thing. It wont tell you a lot about the underlying process or make you understand all there is to understand, but it doesn't have to. It will tell you what to do or how to do it and as such it's useful.

Content: 9/10

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

First impressions are of a simplistic site with a professional logo and a neat navigation menu. Those happen to be the best things about it, but alas I don't come empty of suggestions and improvements. There's plenty of opportunity here.

First of all, the main menu is quite good even as it is although its vertical size may require people who still use resolutions lower than 1280x1024 to scroll down for the lower menu items. However, it doesn't fill the full width of the sidebar leaving the sidebar border hanging and creating an impression of unnecessary clutter. Fixing this may be a simple matter of adjusting the paddings and width of the drop down menu widget. The border of the sidebar could also be removed. It may be worth experimenting with this, but the idea is to tie up all the loose ends and have everything nicely aligned.

Also regarding the sidebar, the search box on it is too wide to fit within the borders of the sidebar so it sticks out. If the border were to be removed this would be fixed. Otherwise the search input box should be reduced in width.

The main menu seems to display categories and in sub-menus the articles in those categories. This leads me to expect that clicking on the category itself would list all articles in it, but instead it lists only one of them which can get confusing. Perhaps it's not a major issue given that all articles are apparently shown in the menu itself, but it's worth noting. Displaying all articles as drop downs only may also lead to an issue of not all articles fitting the screen and scrolling while keeping the drop down open can get tricky.

Another issue is that it is easy to confuse article titles and titles of sections within those articles in the homepage teasers because the two look too similar to each other. For instance for a bit I thought that "Xbox Live Features" was a title of an article when on a closer look (and a hover with a mouse over the real title link) reveals that this is just a section title, but the actual article is "Free Xbox Live Codes". This issue also adds to a perceived clutter of the homepage as the article and section titles on the homepage interchange with irregular distances. There is also no distinction between the introductory text and the articles.

Making article titles larger than the section titles (which are currently the ones which are larger) and changing their color to something distinctively different would already be of much help. Additionally teasers could be restricted to display only the introduction and no further sections which would make them display even more neatly on the homepage.

Speaking of teasers I noticed that below the teaser for "Free Xbox Live Codes" it says it has 3 comments, but clicking on that reveals no comments on the article page, just "Login to post comments". It's possible that anonymous users don't even have the permission to read the comments, not just view them, which I would venture to guess isn't the intention of the administrator. Otherwise displaying the number of comments seems unnecessary.

Speaking of the article page, the square ad that displays on it has a too low margin between it and the text around it. The result is that it looks more crammed, especially when the image ad displays when it almost touches the letters of the text. Also, the square ad below the article could be styled to fit the colors of the site or at least the colors of the sidebar ad.

All this said, it may be worth experimenting with additional improvements to the design. It might be a little too bare. Perhaps some sort of a distinction between the main content area and sidebars could be added in addition to the fixes mentioned. Maybe a header could be made more exciting. An introduction text could be put in a nice box. Something could be put in the footer which is currently empty.

Design Rating: 5/10

Focus:

While the name Symatech reveals only the tie to technology the introduction makes an attempt at describing the site. There is also a slogan "We help make your life simple" which could either refer to the fact that technology tends to make lives easier or the focus of the site to making complicated things sound simpler. Unfortunately the introduction leaves something to be desired in terms of connecting with the slogan.

In any case looking at a sample of articles and categories it seems to be a general technology resource that dives in a little deeper into more advanced areas such as cryptography, databases, programming, UNIX and so on. Whether it is a general resource or there really is a specific approach or bent to the type of content that can be found should be briefly clarified in the introduction.

Focus Rating: 7/10

Content:

More than 200 articles are available via drop down menus some of which explain certain subjects in technology and others additionally offer practical guides to doing something such as deleting cookies from a web browser. They often use bullet lists and are split into sections. It almost seems like a small encyclopedia of technical information as it covers such advanced things as types of memory (like DDR2 SDRAM), types of storage interfaces (like RAID or ATAPI), networking systems (TCP, DNS, SSH etc.), UNIX commands and so on. So it can be helpful for someone looking to become a little more tech savvy.

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