Review of SF-Zone.net Programming, Design and Internet Marketing

Another day, another free website review. Today I will be reviewing  the SF-Zone.net website which is a blog dedicated towards Programming, Design and Internet Marketing at least according to the details I got. So let’s get on with it then.

Design and Layout

It’s a clean design without too much clutter [unlike mine . . . 'rolls eyes'];.

I’m not too sure about the color of sidebar navigation menu however, the menu text on the light background looks a bit blurry; something darker against the pale background will stand out a bit more I suppose.

There are some pages in which the layout breaks completely, this might be due to unclosed XHTML tags somewhere in the page. For instance, the ebooks page is totally broken, I tested this in IE6, IE7 and FF3 and I get exactly the same view as in the one shown in screenshot below.
It is worth correcting such errors as soon as possible.

Markup and Navigation

The blog roll links open in the current window; I would advise against because, this could end up being a “black hole” for visitors to your website.

Suppose, If someone lands on your site after searching for “is squidoo worth it?” and immediately they see a link about Affiliate Programs; if they click on that, chances are that they will leave your site for good without even reading what they came there for. I know I have done that on several occasions.

So I would suggest you

1. Open your blog roll links in a new window i.e. target=_blank in your links.
2. Reduce the text size of your blog  roll links relative to the website’s main navigation links, that way you draw attention to the most important parts of your website i.e. your content links rather than external links.
3. The links, Software Company Outsourcing services and Software Development services are too long; so you can either re-word the anchor text or increase the padding or margin in that part of your website.

Too many markup errors mostly coming from the many embedded Javascripts. I couldn’t get a single page that validate or at least has less than 20 XHTML validation errors. The home page, design category, windows shell alternative all fail validation.

Content and Updates

Good quality content across a wide range of categories. However, the problem with such wide range of content is that it is very possible to get untargeted traffic from search engine. I have had a similar problem, am still trying to prune some content about, business plans, credit crunch etc from this website because such topics are wayward from the target niche of this website. i.e. web design reviews and validation.

The updates are somewhat irregular, e.g from the 30th of July to the 12th August there was no update. This could be a bad omen for loss of “loyal visitors.”

Try keeping your updates schedule as regular as possible and try to stick to that schedule of updates. This ensures that your visitors would know when to check for new content from your web site because they will know you update schedule.

Verdict

Overall, the site has lots of potential bar a few minor issues

• Lack of About Us/me page, like who are you and what is your website about?
• No contact us/me form apart from the comment form, you can check out wordpress’ Contact Form 7
• The email address in the privacy policy says email to admin@xtutorials.net, not too sure whether that’s intentional or just an oversight. [I stand to be corrected]
• The Read More link in the fold (immediately below the navigation bar) the one that leads to the ebook can seriously harm the credibility of your website. The reason being that, it is not clear whether, you are the author of that ebook, or you’re reselling it, have you used it? Moreover, the testimonials in the ebook webpage have no reference, it could have been written by anyone.
• Stream-lining content towards a specific niche, for instance, Programming is a very broad concept so having a website which talks about programming amongst other categories might make it very difficult to do well in search engine or get targeted traffic.

All in all, nice job by the blogger and the best of luck to him/her in their blogging escapade.