Redesign : Game-Reviews.ca

[Emancipator]

Just redesigned my site to make it more streamlined for me to update. The entire site uses my custom CMS system which I have updated to have some new features in it. Daily maintenance was about 30minutes and now its tops 15minutes to get my daily news fix up.

On the mainpage the main feature image, text and link are changed within the admin, no coding involved. Not that I cant code, but its just much easier to fly into the admin and update on the fly.

The featured eye candy is also updated the same way. Each image can be updated separately.

Index Page : http://www.game-reviews.ca/
Sample News Page : http://www.game-reviews.ca/news_727.htm

I would not consider this done, I only spent 2 hours putting it together but it for the most part is complete. Constructive commentary welcome :)

[Cutter]

Very nice!

You might want to try Adsense on there, especially for any online-game pages; many MMORPG keywords are going for over $1 now due to the gold and item resale market.

[Emancipator]

Thanks Cutter. I am trying hard to keep my ads "out of your face". I thought about putting adsense at the end of my article. Any thoughts? So at the end of this articcle have a google banner that matches my colors

http://www.game-reviews.ca/news.php?id=731

[Westech]

Looks good! I second the adsense idea.

[Emancipator]

so do you think it looks good with the adsense where it is now under my article?

[Cutter]

It looks fine, but there are issues with context which really becomes critical to clickthrough rate.

Wasn't there some code that Google released that you could use to emphasize certain sections of a page? I'm actually having the same context problem on one of my blogs right now.

[Emancipator]

i would say we should wait till google spiders my pages before we worry about the context though. I literally just added it so it should be showing WHACK ads. :)

[John]

I had that problemon on one of my sites, the site is basically all rss feeds so instead of showing ads related to the content of the feeds they showed ads for data feed software. All I had to do was use the <!-- google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) --> tag before my feeds and within a week all of my ads were related to my page.

[Emancipator]

very cool. in my case i have no material on the page but my content but I am going to keep this in mind for another site of mine. Thanks John!

[Cutter]

I try to keep an eye on adsense context, mainly on pages which get a lot of pageviews. When you are getting a lot of traffic these kind of details can really mean a lot of money.

When you have a page with either newsfeeds or lots of internal links on a navbar sometime it can skew the context of the ads for better or for worse.

[Emancipator]

Makes sense. the ad on the bottom of the page is performing well by the way.

[James]

It's good. I like it; however, I must say that I prefer the old orange + blue colorscheme.

[Emancipator]

you are the 2nd person to say that. I liked the old design as well but the overall consensus is this one is much better. Dont worry though I will probably change it in a month anyways :P

The big improvement in this design is a bigger focus on news since i have so much of it. My previous design also was fubar in firefox and this one I am trying very hard to make 100% working in firefox.

[CreationNation]

Still looking for feedback dude?

In Firefox, the footer looks kinda funky, text doesn't match with the background image. Also, the left side chops off after the banner, I think it would be better if it extended all the way down to the footer.

I dig the colors and layout! Very packed but organized. Maybe add some hover coloring to the links?