Only The Best Of The Web
Full Review by Atrox
Scoring:
First Impressions & Appearance – (6 out of 20)
The first time I accessed OTBOTWeb was when you requested this review, when I first saw the site I thought that everything looked a bit bland and was not very attractive at all. I saw that your logo was pixelated and your navigation did not seem to be using the correct CSS and the map on the bottom left of your homepage does not good at all. Additionally, the buttons on the homepage for "Vote" and "Submit" do not match the rest of the style.
Site Layout – (8 out of 20)
The layout of your site is very good, if you ask me. Everything is well ordered and each page is just as good as the other in terms of the layout. Your navigation bar consists of 7 very useful links to pages that are in logical order. The directory is very well laid out and easy to navigate so that people accessing your site can find everything that you have on a certain subject. There are a few advertisements that popped up whilst I was navigating the site that were rather annoying, but I could put up with that. The only bad part about your layout is that the voting page looks terrible, you're using third party software that does not fit well in the space you have given it. The voting page definitely does need to change.
Statistics and Activity – (7 out of 20)
With a directory that does not tell you when something was submitted, it can be very hard to judge the activity of your website. So this paragraph may be a bit brief. I am helped slightly by the little map that you have on the bottom left hand side of your homepage that tells me where your site was accessed from between the 14th of November to the 19th of November. Over those five days in between the two dates, you managed to wrack up 78 visitors, I would say that for a fairly new directory this is very good - because you could have easily lost those 78 visitors out to other much bigger directories. I can also assume that some of these visitors participate in the voting process, as you did manage to find a winner in your most recent vote. Altogether you're not doing the best when it comes to the statistics and activity, but you're only "new" for a directory and you have many other directories to compete with.
Content – (6 out of 20)
The content of a directory can be very important, a directory should have a very strong collection of websites. OTBOTWeb however, does not have this strong directory despite being up for only a year or so. Not all of your categories have a lot of submissions and actually go to waste. Your sports categories has only two submissions and your cooking, three. For a directory that has been up for a year or so now, I'd expect you to have submitted a lot more sites and make visiting a lot more worthwhile that it is. I can go to a new directory and probably find plenty more submissions than what you have. This is definitely an area that you need to start working on.
Spelling/Grammar & Professionalism – (8 out of 20)
Because there is not a lot of writing on your website, there is not a lot to say about the Spelling/Grammar and Professionalism. I have only briefly scanned over the text that you have on the website and I have not seen anything noticeable in terms of spelling mistakes. However, "Winner of This Months Contest:" and "Vote for Next Months Site Below!!!" does not look the most professional. There are missing apostrophe's and the semi-colon does not look placed very well, along with the three exclamation marks. You only need one exclamation mark to express your enthusiasm - not three. The professionalism is something that needs to be tweaked.
Total Score - (35 out of 100)
Final Remarks:
Your website, whilst being very well laid out besides the voting page does not look very aesthetically pleasing to me and probably many other people. You need to work on the aesthetics quite a lot and the voting page needs to be have a complete overhaul. The directory is not very strong and is virtually useless and is something that you need to build up.
Strengths:
- -The Layout
-Spelling/Grammar & Professionalism
Weaknesses:
