I agree, you should make your site to work without forcing users to disable popup blockers. Why? Well, because thera are millions of sites in internet that work without disabling it and I suppose yours is not so special to have people changing their habits when surfing the Internet.

Besides, this message saying that you're "harming" the owner of the site is very impolite. It's like you were saying that is illegal or immoral to see a website that you put in the Internet with free access if you don't pay (because we know that seeing and clickin ads means money, so you're giving money in a way).

The design is alright, maybe I'll set the outside background to white and the tools I guess are ok, but as I said, try not to have your site living off popup banners or at least don't blame users if you don't know or don't want to do it other way.

Reply

that requirements for popups is kinda lame. I personally am not willing to disable my popups just to see this page.

Reply

Went to have a look at this, using Firefox, but hit the 'sorry.php' page advising me that I wouldn't be able to see the site without disabling adblockers.

Seems to me like catering for your target audience involves educating them why they should disable ads, rather than the (somewhat terse) message that implies the user is harming your site for daring to browse to it! Take a bit more time to try and convince your user to help you out, rather than admonishing them for not, IMO.

So I looked at it in IE7 Same message, turned off pop-up blocker. Same message on forced refresh, added to trusted sites. Same message.

Tried in Opera...saw the page for a moment (which looked good). Then 'Sorry - ...'

Bearing in mind that while I tweak the security settings somewhat, I do not have a dedicated adblocker. Perhaps some indication on the sorry.php page as to what users need to do to view the site (enable pop-ups? trusted site (with the variety of things that that affects)?). After all, there are some security features that I won't disable to view a site, at any time...particularly relating to requiring unrequested installations/driver signings to be authorised (other than cookies, which are harmless).

What is it you are detecting with this script?

Asides from that, the layout is clean and usable, the colour scheme works, and it's fairly clear which sections are clickable (though the search button and login areas could do with the pointer changing to the clicky hand, as you have with the various social site links).

EDIT: Retried, and realised that it's only the home page that is blocked. Not sure whether this is deliberate or not, but I went away once I thought I wouldn't be able to browse the site initially. A few more things I noticed when I looked at the content, then (sorry!):


About Us: Good to have, though I think it would be better without the underline, as that makes it seem like a link. Also, lots of text underlined has the opposite effect of de-emphasising it, as the user ends up ignoring it when it's hard to read.

SEO Tools: Loved the clear and bright buttons - though they could do with alt text. Also, this was the only page that took a long time to load (in all browsers) - maybe optimise those .gifs? If you have fireworks or photoshop, this is fairly easy, but not sure what you have access to.

Contact us: The form is great, and easy to see/use. I would take your email off to save yourself being trawled by spambots....that's why most places have an email form in the first place.

Register: Again, clear and usable - good use of captcha and requiring acceptance of terms of use. Would be nice to have the 'required' asterisks as you have with the contact us page.

Hope that helps!

Reply

That is a very slick and nice site you have there.

Although to me is looks like a 'Web 1.0' kind of website. In my opinion it needs some gloss and shine, some images on those backgrounds.
Also the actual 'Search' box needs to be more distinguished as it took me around 2-3 seconds to actually find it! I'm sure the website would be 2x better if you did that .

Reply

You didn't really have anything of interest to me in your site. It looked much like the forums here - messy, unorganized, and hard to read. Forums are supposed to be like that - websites aren't. I suggest you pick a new template and add some FUN stuff man!

Reply