What happens when someone who hates web development tries to create a website? This happens. So I ask you for help:

1. Can you tell what the site is about just by clicking that link, without any context?
2. What is your first impression? Nice/ugly/confusing/other?
3. Navigation: does it work?
4. Layout and presentation: do you find it easy to focus on the information? Any suggestions?
5. Does it even work on your OS/browser?
6. Click around. Other impressions? Stuff to change? Stuff *not* to change?

Please help a developer in distress!

From just looking at that front page I immediately know what "OpenTK" is. One thing one the navigation is maybe separate the areas for people who want to help development and those who just want the runtimes. Not because it's confusing at present but just for succinctness really.

1. I can by reading the first two sentences. You might make the text slightly bigger and/or have some more white space around it to make it stand out more. I can't from just looking at the design of the website. But it's certainly adequate.


2. Most of it is pretty clean and easy to read. What I don't like is header and the background, it's in a totally different style than the wiki like content area, and to be brutally honest, it looks dated.
   
   Personally, I would like to see the navigation tabs to be more in line with main section, so that they really become a part of it.


3. Yep. Perhaps a additional item to navigate back the home page would be nice. I know you can click the logo like in most sites, but it never hurts to be explicit.


4. Yes, it's okay. I personally would prefer a bit more padding around the individual items, but this might differ from person to person.


5. No problems encountered in IE, FF and Safari (all WinXP), or on the iPhone. :)


6. I might be wrong, but I think the only way to access the gallery is by clicking one of the screen shots. Even though pictures don't tell you much about how and how well a library works, it's something a lot of visitors would like to check out. Perhaps it deserves a tab of its own?

Quote: Can you tell what the site is about just by clicking that link, without any context?

Yes, very clear.

Quote: What is your first impression? Nice/ugly/confusing/other?

Seems like a nicely skinned wiki page.

Quote: Navigation: does it work?

Yes.

Quote: Layout and presentation: do you find it easy to focus on the information? Any suggestions?

Yes, definitely. The one exception is I did not immediately know it was for C# (and I guess other .NET). I thought that when you said 'and can be used by every .Net language' you were referring this to as a bonus. It wasn't until I went to the FAQ that I saw it was C#.

Quote: Does it even work on your OS/browser?

Yes. Windows XP/Firefox.

Quote: Click around. Other impressions? Stuff to change? Stuff *not* to change

What WanMaster suggested about moving the nav buttons more towards the left. I have a pretty wide monitor and its not natural for me to glance to the far right immediately after the far left.

Thanks guys, your comments are appreciated! Please keep the feedback coming, this is my first website and it's great to know what is right and what needs work.

1. Yes
2. Nice
3. Yes
4. Quite nice, maybe tone the cyan down a bit (comes out strong on LCD)
5. Yes, XP/IE8. Finally a page not crippled by deliberate (and unnecessary IE hacks)
6. Less cyan :)

Wow, I expected much worse, but it seems it's not *that* bad. Thanks guys, rates++ and cookies for all! :)

Quote: Wanmaster said:
2. Most of it is pretty clean and easy to read. What I don't like is header and the background, it's in a totally different style than the wiki like content area, and to be brutally honest, it looks dated.

Any ideas? I don't think a light-gray wikipedia-style background will look nice here, but I'm no designer, so...

Quote: Wanmaster said:
6. I might be wrong, but I think the only way to access the gallery is by clicking one of the screen shots. Even though pictures don't tell you much about how and how well a library works, it's something a lot of visitors would like to check out. Perhaps it deserves a tab of its own?

Good catch. There's no space for more tabs (anything less than 1280 resolution and they won't fit on screen), but it might be possible to move tabs into drop-down menus (which I personally dislike, but they have their merits).

The other solution is to move the navigation tabs to a new block on the left side. However, this will leave too much empty space at the top and would look awkward.

Quote: Crazyfool said:
The one exception is I did not immediately know it was for C# (and I guess other .NET). I thought that when you said 'and can be used by every .Net language' you were referring this to as a bonus. It wasn't until I went to the FAQ that I saw it was C#.

Thanks, I've revised the text to indicate that this library is written in C#.

Quote: Crazyfool said:
What WanMaster suggested about moving the nav buttons more towards the left. I have a pretty wide monitor and its not natural for me to glance to the far right immediately after the far left.

Yes, I can see this being a problem on wide monitors (I don't have one). Adding to my todo list.

Quote: Endurion said:
4. Quite nice, maybe tone the cyan down a bit (comes out strong on LCD)

You are right, it's coming out too strong on TFTs. It looked better on my CRT - will fix.

I find the main page too busy, it's absolutely full of text. I hate news pages that make me scroll down a long way to see anything, and yours has two columns which means I get confused what order the stories come in.

Otherwise, the general style and navigation looks pretty fine.

I ended up on this site a fortnight ago. I had no trouble doing what I needed to do there.

There's something wrong with the font. It looks like everything is in bold? It's not pretty. The font for the headers and the menu is fine, but the text in the paragraphs should be in a normal font in my opinion.

More minor details:
* Why the space between the tabs? It's unintuitive.
* I don't really like the cyan color. It doesn't match very well with the rest.

Otherwise, great job! I like it. It's easy to navigate.