Greetings:

I'm submitting my website for review, I'd appreciate any comments and suggestions : http://www.theroria.com

It's still a work in progress; but I'm aiming for it to be a forum based around studying abroad/international studies.

Cheers

Its a very well designed site, easy on the eyes,

not telling you what to do but I would add some kind of Image on the header, maybe students/books/pics of univerities

Also small images in the articles would be good

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hi

its very good and I think the idea for your site is great

the only thing is I found the text in site tag cloud very hard to read, its quite small, maybe you could make the text bigger, other than that its very good

well done

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With the images in articles, I was thinking the same thing. Walls of text can only get you so far .

For the site cloud, I made the text a little bigger. It hadn't really dawned on me that people would actually look at it, for some reason or another, I thought it was just something for the search engines. But it is a good, quick tool to organize the topics .

I definitely do need to spruce up the header. This will take me some time, given the fact that I'm terrible with graphic design .

Thanks for the comments thus far, really appreciated!

hi socksfan, really really wonderful!!!!

It's a good design with wonderful colours that go easy on the eyes
The fonts are exactly the right size and type
The content is lively.
But what actually got me clapping with excitement is the way you embedded your adsense code, it really blends into the design in a different way than we all do it.
So, just keep on movin & great job really

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I like it, it drew me in very quickly.

Is it a blog or a site? Looked kind of bloggy to me. If it's a site, a blog would be a great addition! You're a great writer with catchy titles.

I think an image header would be good, though, as has been said. =)

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I think your site is set up really well.

I agree with alana r about the small text thing, though I could read it I do understand how the size could pose a problem.

I also agree with mirage2009 with the whole embedded adsense code comment! very well done!

Thanks for the comments guys, has made the process all the more encouraging .

Thanks! Right now, the front page is a quasi-blog; the "articles" that are all on the front page are ones I choose to "feature" and in the future would be populated with discussions I choose interesting or helpful. But for now it's my blog.

With regards to the banner-image, I'm still trying to figure out how that would be done. When it comes to html and percentage height & width, I suck. I'm still not sure how I would create a banner that would stretch well with the website.

I guess the problem right now is getting exposure, given that in theory, it's supposed to be a discussino board. Surprisingly, this is the first discussion board I've seen directly related to studying abroad. I've seen maybe 2 others (I've been looking!) and they were all part of a bigger discussion board related with general collegiate studies. I guess this is good for me as it gives me the uniqueness factor, but I find it hard to promote, short of dishing out some cash to get it up on adsense. This wouldn't be my first forum that I run, but it will be the first that I start with no base community, so this is a new process for me.

Second question I guess I have is, did this website strike any of you as actually being a discussion board? As augenauf said, it looked kind of bloggy to him. So I guess my question is had you guys had a genuine interest or question, would you have known to sign up and post?

Third question, I've seen on occasion people telling me that the website has been slow to load. Has this been the case for anyone?


Fourthly, as per the suggestions, I increased the font height in the tag cloud. It's definitely much more readable for me, and I hope that is the case for everyone else. Well, that's not really a question, but hey - this is my post and I can determine the composition of it (or lack thereof).

Thanks for the input so far.


Cheers

well I can't tell if it was slow loading, because I have a very fast connection.

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I wish I was more qualified to discuss this, but I am not. I would definetely find someone who is and ask for their input. For example, each of your page titles could have more information.. include keywords that search engines crawlers will use. Include meta tags.. I really would take a look at each page and think about keywords will drive traffic to your site. Try to use those keywords in the top 50 words.

Nice site, good colors, I agree with the other comments about the text.

Socksfan,

Yes, there is a bit of an issue. I have a relatively fast service and I can still tell it is a slower than it should be, although not severely so.

I can tell you why and how to speed it up. Your pictures are not properly sized and the width and height are not consistently placed into the html code.

For example, take the picture of the man pushing down on the suitcase. The actual size of the picture is 448px × 295px but the space it is allowed is 296px × 195px. This means there are 132,160 px downloaded but for a space that only holds 57,720 px or 2.29 times as many as used. If this is similar for other pictures you could be taking more than twice as much time as needed to download images. They should be resized (Irfanview is a free graphics program that even photoshop users like for ease in resizing).

Also, in the case of this image (I didn't check others) you have the height but not the width specified in the html. Without defining the space fully, your page must download files as the page is loaded which slows down loading. When all your images are given width and height in the html image code a placeholder will define the space needed, the page will all load, then images filled in. That way the page will quickly load and images from the top filled so the page will appear fully loaded while images below the fold continue to be downloaded.

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James
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"We don't always get what we want, but we always get what we expect."