Web Design Clinic - Fire Studios

Fire G asked for his site to be reviewed.

"I would like to hear the reviews on my site"

My Thoughts
The first thing that jumped out at me about this site was the color scheme. The title of the site is "Fire Studios" but the main accent color is blue like water. Yes, he does use the fire logo, but since it's blue, it ends up looking more like a strange flower than actual fire. The idea seems to be to create some tension by using a color associated with water for a site named for fire. Unfortunately, this ends up looking more clichéd than innovative.

The design is nice, but it seems very prosaic to me. Many of the design elements are very popular right now, so they make the site seem less interesting. In a site for dog food or basketry, this might be good, but on what appears to be a Web design or possibly graphics tutorial site it ends up being a little boring. Some of the things I mean include:

• It looks like a blog without dates. Perhaps it is a blog, but it doesn't include any of the standard links we're used to seeing with blogs, so it seems incorrect.
• The reflection of the logo. I know others feel that this is still nice and not overdone, but I've been seeing this effect for 4 years, and I'm bored with it. It reminds me of 10 years ago when people would put up animated GIF images with water rippling at the bottom. That got old really fast too.
• Tiny text in the navigation. The only thing Fire G avoids here is he uses decent sized text for his main content. But navigation is important, and it's too small for a non-teenager to read.
• Grey text on black background. Okay, this isn't so much boring as annoying. When you add this color choice to the tiny text, it makes the navigation impossible to read. Why would anyone go to any of his "Favorite Sites" when they can't read where they are going to end up?

Some other things that I would address on this site are:

• Why do most of the entries in the main section have links? The first entry says "Visit the Templates page..." but that page is not linked anywhere in the post. When this post scrolls further down on the page, it will be even more tedious for the reader to have to scroll back up to the one link to the templates in the navigation bar at the top.
• The image should be linked as well. People click on images. If they aren't linked, you lose out on another pageview.
• "Click here". Don't use this as your link navigation. It does nothing for you for SEO purposes, and in most cases doesn't entice your customers to click. Make the link text relevant to where they're going to go.
• Add dates to the entries. It's somewhat confusing to read "Today we had to upgrade Fire Studios..." but without any date to reference. Unless you change the home page every day (and based on the dates further down, I don't think you do), references to "today" are confusing and not useful to your readers.
• Check your spelling.
• And finally, you can't "pre-date" your copyright notice. Unless you've perfected time travel, you can't copyright a Web page for future dates. In fact, you really can't copyright the pages before they went live, either. Right now your copyright notice reads 2007-2010. But your content implies that the page didn't go live until February 2008. So the most you can claim is 2008.

How would you critique this site?
What would you suggest to Fire G to improve this design? Are there other things he could do to improve the site? Provide your own feedback on the site design by responding to his forum post or commenting here in the blog.

Do You Want Your Site Considered for the Web Design Clinic?
There are two ways you can have your site reviewed on Web Design @ About.com:

1. Post a request in the Site Review Requests folder in the Web Design forum. This is the best way to get feedback, as you'll get responses from other Web designers in the forum, and selected posts will be chosen for the Web Design Clinic.
2. Submit your site to the Web Design Design Gallery and check the "solicit critiques" checkbox on the form. Pages submitted there will be reviewed by the About.com Guide to Web Design, Jennifer Kyrnin, and may be chosen for the Web Design Clinic.