Please review my movies, series & anime related website

Hello,

Only a couple of months ago I found my interest in webdesign.
As of now I'm still trying to learn as much as I can.

Hopefully you can help me by giving me feedback on:

- Website lay-out/design
- Can you tell what the use of my website is?
- Any comments that you can make on improvement.

I can take any critique so don't hold back guys! :D

website adress: www.toptentelevision.com

* note: my website is a work in progress, not all is finished.
To see how a top 10 list wil look see browse movies/action(or)adventure

I would put your first 2-3 pages worth of content onto the front page. That would make it look more interesting as well, now it looks kinda empty - letting me choose out of 3 categories and thats all front page does? It can surely hold more content and fun stuff. Will be better for seo as well.

You can at least do like
Movies
a) genre1
b) genre2
...

Anime
a) genre1
b) genre2
...

Another thing is that i dont have any credibility for your list. I clicked "movies > action" and to me that just looked like 10 random movies pulled out of the blue with pearl harbor being on the first place - is it like best action movie of all times? really? Giving out some criteria will make it look more professional and will let people decide if they do want to actually check the list or not.

Mmyesh Lieto!

That was excellent feedback. I will definitely add that to my homepage, I was struggling with that page the most!

In the FAQ and the About Us page you can see that:
The top 10 lists are rated by me and my friends.
It's nothing official it is just what we think you would enjoy watching most.
Pearl Harbor was a blast for us to watch so thats why. xD

But yes! I should intergrate some rating system for sure so everybody will understand more!

to me pearl harbor was kinda like titanic - drama. Sure there is some shooting and bombing going on but i felt like it wasnt the main idea )

Design is very professional but I am not exactly sure what the website is suppose to be for?

Maybe a little explanation, then again it may just be my opinion.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Acoustic101

Design is very professional but I am not exactly sure what the website is suppose to be for?

Maybe a little explanation, then again it may just be my opinion.

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Well your opinion is valuable to me. Did you notice the 3 short explanations about the website on the homepage?
If you did, what can I do to improve the explaining? if you didn't, maybe thats after reading you do understand? :)

What my website is supposed to be
my website tells you what the best movies, tv shows and anime are.
you can see a top 10 list for a whole bunch of genres like post-apocalyptic, comic and comedy.
these lists are based on what me and my friends think you will enjoy most.

About you home page. It's so boring, really. You have a entrateiment entertainment site, so why don't you add some bright colors and nice pictures? Genres you can view as a tags ot tag cloud. You have a full page with genres and takes all you page... make them much smaller and you pics. When you browse to the movie i think that it would be great if add some screenshots from the movie and maybe even a trailer from it. Also On this page you can some sharing buttons or at leat facebook and tweeter, vote for the movie would be good as well. Oh one more thing maybe you can add comments for the movie. So people can write their opinions about it. It's easy you can even use disquas for it .That's it for now) Wish you a good luck and you have some question fell free to reach me.

Thank you for the advice, I will incorporate the user ratings later. About the homepage. I redid the thing. The anime links dont work yet because I haven't written the top 10 lists yet.
What do you think?

Hi there,

All in all your site looks very neat but somewhat lacks impact. You need few more things that catch the attention of site visitors. Here are some of the things I would do if I were to work on this site...

Site title - I would just say "Top Ten Television!" and make the whole thing bigger.

About Us - Following on from the above, I would then put "Welcome" in this bit. It'll be very nice if you use full width image or illustration as a background here - maybe something like a person sitting on a confy sofa and watching TV. This way you can convey what your site is all about.

Heading - they look, well, boring... Maybe you can use the same font as the site title and work on the colour?

These are just my thought but I'm sure you can improve your site much more if you keep working on the finer points :)

Thanks a lot for your feedback JungleJap, I completely agree with you!
Those are some great improvements that I will start working on right now!

Any thoughts on the color of the heading? I think when it's not black the site will be too colorfull and that would be distracting.
I'd like to keep everything simple and overseeable :D

Hi,

I think you're off to a good start in general.

Some notes:

Color Scheme

I find your color scheme to not be lively enough. It's a monochromatic scheme, which isn't bad, but it feels a bit dead to me. You could give the header some color. Or you could give some other elements color to add a bit of spark. I'd also make the links a different color. They're a bit hard to figure out as it is.

Typography

I'm not sold on the typography. The script font doesn't work in this context, imo. The layout itself is too factual for that. Script fonts shine when the overall aesthetics and design elements are softer, playful, and contain few visible boundaries. Making script fonts work on a web page isn't easy. See this and this example where script or quirky fonts work and integrate well into the overall design aesthetic and brand.

Hompage

I think you could add more depth and meaning to the list section. Right now there are only thumbnails, and all in the same color within a column. I'd make each item in a column more distinct. I would add some text for each element and/or add a small thumbnail of an actual movie, series, or Anime and display each of those three columns in list format. Whatever you try, I'd focus on getting rid of the "empty" feel. The thumbnails feel a bit lost right now.

Youtube has a pretty good structure. Not that you should copy it, but see how they do their categories and how alive and engaging it feels: http://www.youtube.com/videos?feature=mh. Vimeo also has a very nice way of presenting their categories as you can see here: http://vimeo.com/categories

Browse Series/Movies/Anime pages

These pages need the most work. All I get is the alphabet. It feels extremely empty and the letters feel somewhat lost. I would work out a way to display the information on this page a bit tighter and add more meaning to it. The structure as it is now would break the moment you have more than three topics per letter.

Single Category Page

E.g. this one: http://www.toptentelevision.com/action1.html

How you have structured this page works very well for me. I think you nailed it in terms of how you've laid out the content. The uppercase script font, however, doesn't work at all for me. I'd definitely look for an alternative font for headings. Perhaps see this tool to experiment with different font combinations: http://font-combinator.com/.

A sidenote: I'd probably be more sparse in my use of centred text. The About page, for example, has centred text which looks somewhat weird to me.

Overall, I'd try and experiment more with color, perhaps not much but subtly, and lay out the content element more tightly. Whitespace is good, but the elements that contextually belong together should not feel detached from another.

Anyhow, given that you've just started out, you've done a good job. You'll get there! :D

Edit: I've not looked at your code, just concentrated on "what I see".

For this theme you need to make your website more attractive. Need one colorful image on your website background.

I like the design. It's nice at first look, but what is the goal of website? to be IMDB? i feel it's better if you change your way

There are some things I think you're doing really well here. The first is that you explain the purpose of the site above the "fold," so I know exactly what the purpose is. You give me a link to explain who you are and why you're ranking the items in each category, and you invite user input. That's all good!

I understand why some reviewers are advising you to make the design a little more exciting, but I think it's well-organized and easy to read, and for content like this, I would rather be able to focus on the content than wade through a lot of graphics. IMO, if you can't have a "perfect" design, you're wise to err toward "safe" instead of cluttered, because people will still be able to access your content.

When I open your lists and see a one-sentence summary about the comic or show, I sort of wonder why I clicked, because I'm not getting new information. Once you get me to the top ten list, I'm sort of hoping to do something or find something new, but there really isn't anything. A quick interactive touch would be a poll--invite users to vote on which of the Top Ten things in each list they like best. You might also link the pictures to your sales pages for each product.

I also think that visually, it would be nice to be able to view the list (1-10) in one place, without scrolling--the pictures seem too large and there's a lot of blank space. You might be able to add a short text list at the top and link each item (show, movie, whatever) to a more detailed entry on the same page, farther below the list. In that area, you might also be able to add a place for site users to submit comments about the movie or show, and add them to individual pages.

I would have a second look at your writing and re-work some of it so that it flows more naturally. If you read it out loud, you can hear that the sentences have similar lengths, so the text begins to sound almost robotic. If you combine some sentences together, and omit information that isn't important, the pages will be clearer and more exciting.

Good luck with your site!

Wow.. I just took in so much useful information and I LOVE IT!

Thank you all for leaving such great feedback, this is motivating me a lot to keep learning and improving.
I'd like to mention Kohoutes and J in Calgary because they gave me a whole new perspective on webdesign with their awesome feedback!

I made an overseeable list of your feedback, I will go and fix every issue on that list straight away!

- Milan :D