Critiques Please

You need to give us some criteria to judge your site against:
– Who is your website for?
– What is it meant to do on the home page for example?

Those are decent points. So, here goes.

From an appearance standpoint, do the elements fit. Do the colors work with each other. Does anything seem out of place or positioned in less than an effective way.

It is for those whoc can’t get there fill of political and social commentary and deals with current hot topics. It will probably have more people who view it rather than joining and participating in the discussion. For that reason, I removed the forum page. It is too early to have any real following, so an empty forum would be counter productive at this time.

The home page is designed for commentary on current issues. Those posts are sent to Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr, were presumably, people will see the links and say “wow, that’s true”, or “who is that idiot”, and possibly visiting the site and reading further.

In other words, it’s a site for old grumpy folks for whom, shaking their fists at the evening news, has lost its charm. ??

My first impression is that the header takes up too much space. Maybe it’s what you want, but to me I feel like it’s wasted space. It might work though. I read that line.

I also think you should definitely add some pictures. It’s all text. Some users (maybe most) will be turned off by that. Its like “information overload” so they might not even try.

When I clicked a link, I personally like to be able to comment without registering. For some sites, you want to say something but don’t go enough to bother remembering a password or whatever. So I just don’t comment.

I guess it is obvious I’m not a “media is the message” person. I didn’t convert over to WordPress until three days ago, and kept posting. A site I set up for someone else took two weeks of getting the “look” right before they entered a single post.

I’ll consider letting guests post or comment after putting all the safeguards I think I’ll need, in place.

Thanks for your input.

What “safeguards” do you think you will need to allow commenting? – You can always just require comments to be moderated before being posted – but the whole concept of the site as being one of free speech (if I understand it) would mean that you shouldn’t need to worry about such things.

Aesthetically: I hate the hit counter at the bottom of the page and I think the colours are a bit “pooey” in places. I also agree with the previous poster about the size of the header.