Http://www.freelancelocaltech.com

We just did a complete redesign of the site and are looking for your general impressions on useability and overall design look and feel. Thanks!

IMO, better make the sidebar height same as the other column.. maybe you should put the adsense on the other area of the template..

Thanks for the feedback, ghing. We're trying to figure out how to balance the need for revenue and having the ads be not so obvious. We're running a test this month with the ads to see where on the site they are going to be most effective; we'll adjust them around a bit next month and run some more tests to try and see if we can find that elusive balance.

Thanks again. Anyone else with feedback about FLT?

for starters, I feel like your images are dated.

Your content is not centered in Fx2.

Your adsense ads are a million miles below the content on your homepage... if i hadn't bothered to scroll down i never would have seen them

Your site makes a lot of HTTP requests... which slows it down a bit. You also include a bunch of CSS and JS files.

Your HTML is also a bit dated. I saw some <center> tags in there... not good practice, considering you have CSS files...

I fixed the FF2 bug. I had been meaning to get to that.

The ad block on the right is on every page and some of them do extend quite far down the page, so the adsense ads will be more obvious in some places than others. Adsense isn't the best source of revenue for this site anyway, because it takes people away from the site when they click an ad. Am investigating alternatives, but not happy with any of them so far.

What you were seeing in the http/css/js requests and outdated html is from the infrastructure for the search engine, Sphider, and I'll likely have to replace the engine sooner rather than later, just because I can't spider the site fast enough now that there are over 150,000 dynamic pages on the site to be indexed. So the requests and HTML are the least of my issues with that.

Thanks for the feedback! Anyone got more for me?

I would try to structure the content sections a bit more. Some sort of separation is needed. Maybe better utilizing your whitespace. Your header seems old too. Overall I think more structure is needed outlining your content sections. Everything just seems to run together.

Thanks for the feedback, although I really don't quite understand what you are talking about.

What do you mean the header seems old? What content sections? I think additional explanation would be helpful to me. THANKS!

Your sections of content all "run in" to each other. There isn't a clear separation in the design of page. Adding borders may be helpful or changing the font of a section that you want to call attention to. I also think I would take the blog box out of the right column and make it apart of my 'content' not my 'ads'.

The header is "flat" and very basic. It needs to use more design trends (i.e. rounded corners, gradients, reflection, shadows, etc.) Those design elements could be used in the entire site.

Another thought, maybe you include a breadcrumb navigation just under the header

Thanks for the feedback @ae36. I'm sure we'll catch some of those on the next upgrade. Any feedback from anyone else?

From the first impression, the design, layout is abit un organized

But the content, service provided is quite useful for freelancer. Great service i could say


out topic:
I am running a freelancer network.
http://www.soskod.com
Are you interested in having link exchange with me?
plz contact webmaster[at]soskod[dot]com

I'll agree that at present, the home page has too many competing blocks of info. We had it in more of a grid look to start, but that didn't help, because you weren't sure where to look first. When we stop adding countries and stop having bonus offers for new countries (which should be by end of year), we'll be able to make the front page look more organized, I think.

As for link exchange, no thanks. We already sort-of provide that with freelancers who list with us... and that's the type of backlinks the site needs, since it's more relevant to our search terms.

Thanks for the feedback!

The site looks sober, that's true (as speaking of design). But it's a buisness design i think, so it doesn't need game images renders.
I used ff , ie 7 and opera 9.25 and all were good,
though the bottom right advertisement makes that the page has a scrollbar that goes under the copyright, to just an entire blank space. Maby make that ad horizontal or smaller?

Good to know about Opera. I hadn't checked there, thanks! Yeah, on longer pages, that ad is useful, but on short ones like the home page, it's basically invisible. If I could only figure out which pages were going to be the "long" ones, that would help.... After I finish my do-over on the search engine this weekend, I'll look at that and see if there's a better way to present the ads.

Thanks for your feedback. Anyone else?

You declare an XHTML 1.0 Transitional doctype, but the page has over 100 errors when validated.

If you're going to declare a doctype, then you should write code that is valid according to that doctype.

Thanks, @Adrastea. Some of the errors came from a search engine package that was integrated into the site (and since changed to one that could handle the size of the site) and some are just dumb things. I will work to correct that.

Any other feedback, anyone?