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I just think of that as a given(actual design to allow swordsman to kill flying bastards) for this game. It only works on flying bad guys(as far as i know)....
 

All right. As per you request, thank you very much for cutting out the only useful column there is for space instead of, I don't know, maybe removing the 130+ px (on 1280x1024 resolution) of background color on both sides. Or maybe making that useless Latest News/Charts/Forums column narrower by, just a thought, utilizing the huge amount of vertical space available.


A "here and now issue"? Who made that call? You?
I'd say a page in an article should be at least 2 or 3 screenfuls and an article should be an absolute maximum of 15 pages.
And while I'm at it, you could add link rel="next" and link rel="prev" to point to next and previous pages of the article accordingly. Currently they sort of work sometimes but can't be relied on - on occasion ">> Show" button (Opera) leads to an ad or a shop item or even to some full-size image.


Now thinking a bit more about the site, I think Articles page is a good starting point to what the home page and other navigation pages should be like.
The left menu needs to be rearranged to show HW categories + the couple of others there are. Having "Solutions" and that sort of crap is an abomination that can only possibly serve some casual reader searching for an answer for a specific, well-defined question. For anyone else (including other casual readers) that doesn't work at all.
The left menu also needs to show subcategories. Now I click on a category (by random, since I am not looking for a "solution" or a "component" but am trying to keep up with things) and the menu doesn't reveal more choices (which might not even be needed if it was as detailed above) but the subcategories are shown in two columns on the text column. Ever heard of POLA? This is a major violation.

Moving on to the text column. There are newest articles out of "all articles". They should be categorized. Currently, the categories they belong to are shown (which is good), but in a way that makes it difficult for a reader to scan for items in a particular category.

Articles and reviews should be separated. I don't mean categorically because I can see how the distinction could be somewhat hazy. I mean the shown title headings should show the distinction. And since the main stuff should be reviews, other texts should have "Article:" or similar prepended on the title.

I'm not even thinking about the right column since my eyes instinctively skip over it. I consider it mostly a waste of precious screen estate.

I'm probably leaving out massive amounts of stuff but essentially redesigning your website to make it usable is a major undertaking and unlike you I'm not getting paid to do it.
 
I know this isn't necessarily forum related, but I went to the 'new' tomshardware.com page and it asked me which country I'm in.

There is a whole 'nother hemisphere you know...

Perhaps rewording that main page to something like: "Which country's site would you like to visit?", although just adding a few more options such as Australia, NZ, SA, etc that are English speaking and quite into technology would be good too.
 
So I thought Id give a bit of feedback real fast (Somewhat in a rush, will be short)...

I've been coming to THG for 10 years (Since about 1996!)... I used to come on here almost everyday at some points... Recently (Anywhere from the past few months to a couple years), it seems the site had just gone downhill. I'm not sure if you can see this in the # of visits you get everyday/month/year, but for me personally, its just not the same...

I can't quiet put my finger on it... its mostly the layout, I really can't stand this new layout at all...It seems way too flashy... (Like the difference between MSN Picture Searching and Yahoo Picture Searching, Yahoo being the better, go try it out)... I prefer the classic old design. Besides the layout design, the content isn't like it used to be either. TomsHardwareGuide just doesn't do it for me anymore, and im afraid I won't be coming back (For a long time atleast, hope to see some form of change to bring me back)

Kind of sad to be so turned off to make me not want to come back... I really have been going here for 10 years, since the 3DFX / Voodoo days! I always felt you guys were gods among other computer sites... but recently everything has changed... Possibly new management, maybe you guys got bought out, maybe your taking risks and trying new stuff, perhaps your trying to venture into too many areas, i have no idea, but whatever it is isn't working 🙁

I have a 'Favorite Links' setup in my IE... Each folder in the link tab is labelled "Daily", "Weekly", "Monthly", "Yearly", and each category has maybe 5-10 websites in them, which I click on everyday, or sometimes once a month (Hence the tab name)... You guys used to be in my Daily where Id visit the site at home/work daily, Now ive moved your link to my monthly, so I will be back in a month! I really hope to see some form of change guys, sorry 🙁
 
What happened to the interactive VGA charts? The new one sucks. I liked being able to quickly find the card and it's individual performance results along with comparing it with against other cards. Well, that's one less bookmark I'll need now.
 
Painfully slow, charts section is broken in Opera and Safari - re: dropdown menus for example have cut off backgrounds and are often too long for most screens - links to even find the charts under hardware confusing - re: cpu on main page takes you straight to workstation CPU's with no links to elsewhere) - the fixed metric fonts are unusably small for most 120dpi/large font users, the cyan text on the grey background in several places is too low a contrast to be legible - re: the dark grey footer, though on the white it's pretty bad too.

... and the code is such a train wreck it's a miracle it works. It is embarassingly bad using presentational markup, inlined scripting, presentational images in the markup, two to three times the number of classes than should be needed, an ungodly amount of javascript that doesn't seem to be doing ANYTHING apart from bloating out the page or doing stuff that should be handled in CSS, improper heading tag orders, lack of heading tags on elements that should have them, comments after the HTML tag is closed, and 29 validation errors.

Here's a tip, if you have 67k of markup for 5k of actual page content, your code is likely six times what it should be. There is NO reason for the home page's markup to be more than 15k apart from being made of /FAIL/ and being an overcomplicated mess - and I'd be suprised to see it end up larger than 10k.

The number of files ALSO is made of /fail/. 106 separate files is going to work out to almost 40 seconds of handshaking in most browsers on a good day, and on dialup or a machine maxed out on connections with something like a torrent we're talking over a minute and a half HANDSHAKING - that's before we even TALK about filesizes. Combine this with the UNGODLY total size of 609k COMPRESSED (almost a meg uncompressed) and it's no wonder it's slower than molassas in february.

101k of javascript COMPRESSED (339k uncompressed) ALONE should be a red warning flag that whoever wrote this "New Tom's" has no business writing a web page - though I'm certain they put a lot of effort into it, more's the pity... the absure amount of overcomplication makes it slow, bloated and a miserable failure when it comes to accessability. A for effort, F-- for knowledge on how to write a website PROPERLY.

You should actually be embarrassed to launch such a mess - code-wise there's more of 1997 to this than 2008, but in terms of filesize and number of files there's more of 2018 to it than 2008. Either way this is garbage by today's standards of accessability, size, file count and coding practices.

Pay particular attention to the word "standards", you might want to read them, or an even crazier thought FOLLOW them:
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/
http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/
http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10/

Oh, and does it not allow more than five comments per article, do comments need approval or am I not seeing the link to see other comments? In any case /fail/ for not saying anything about that.
 

Assuming that it sees any keywords or meaningful content to index... Let's use the articles index page as an example.

Excuse the reformatting, would actually have liked it to have a chance to appear without too much scrolling in the forums.

[fixed]<li class="clearfix">
<a
href="http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/external-raid-storage,1922.html"
title="External RAID Storage "
onclick="xt_med('C', 1, 'older news', 'N')"
class="title3"
>
External RAID Storage
</a>
<span class="dateElm">
May 2, 2008 – 1:00 AM –
<a href="http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/Storage,5/External-Storage,20/">
External Storage
</a>
</span>
<p>
iSCSI and SAS storage are flexible and powerful—but expensive.
We looked at two direct attached storage solution kits from
Accusys and AMCC/3Ware.
<a href="http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/external-raid-storage,1922.html">
Read more
</a>
</p>
</li>[/fixed]

Let's dissect this shall we? From an SEO standpoint why exactly is that first anchor NOT a h2? If you have to resort to a tittle attribute, you have the wrong value inside your anchor - if it's identical, you are just wasting code. You've got the windows 1252 character set dash embedded in a page that's using the iso-8859-1 character set so a lot of search engines will just stop there.... and you have a link that is NOT part of the paragraph inside the paragraph tag...

Much less from a coding standpoint - Not certain what that onclick method is supposed to accomplish apart from throwing javascript errors in Firefox and Opera... there's only one span why are you wasting a class on it? if the top anchor was a h2 you'd not need the class on that anchor, and of course that STUPID MALFING CLEARFIX RUBBISH which if you understand the box model is completely unneeded - especially since there is nothing there that should WARRANT anything being floats that would need it!

Or this for example:
[fixed]
<div class="clearfix BOM-multitabs-headerWrapper">
<div class="BOM-multitabs-header">
<ul class="clearfix">
<li style="border-top: 0; border-left: 0">
<a href="#" class="BOM-multitabs-selectTab" style="width: 110px" title="Overclocking"
>
<strong>Overclocking</strong>
</a>
</li>
<li style="border-top: 0; border-left: 0">
<a href="#" style="width: 109px" title="Buyer's Guides">
<strong>Buyer's Guides</strong>
</a>
</li>
<li style="border-top: 0; border-left: 0">
<a href="#" style="width: 110px" title="CeBIT">
<strong>Build Your Own</strong>
</a>
</li>
<li style="border-top: 0; clear: left; border-left: 0">
<a href="#" style="width: 110px" title="AMD/ATI">
<strong>AMD/ATI</strong>
</a>
</li>
<li style="border-top: 0; border-left: 0">
<a href="#" style="width: 109px" title="INTEL">
<strong>INTEL</strong>
</a>
</li>
<li style="border-top: 0; border-left: 0">
<a href="#" style="width: 110px" title="NVIDIA">
<strong>NVIDIA</strong>
</a>
</li>
</ul>
</div>
</div>[/fixed]

two div's that aren't doing a damned thing that couldn't be applied directly to the UL, redundant inline styles on the LI when there's a perfectly good class wrapping everything, AGAIN with the stupid clearfix nonsense, strong tag that isn't accomplishing anything apart from rating those words as greater importance than the actual CONTENT on the page, again with the redundant title attribute, inlined styling of widths - it's a miserable failure code-wise. There is no reason for that to be more than:
[fixed]<ul id="bomMultitabs">
<li class="selected">
<a href="#">Overclocking</a>
</li><li class="middle">
<a href="#">Buyer's Guides</a>
</li><li>
<a href="#">Build Your Own</a>
</li><li class="newline">
<a href="#">AMD/ATI</a>
</li><li class="middle">
<a href="#">INTEL</a>
</li><li>
<a href="#">NVIDIA</a>
</li>
</ul>[/fixed]
Apart from severe overthinking of the code - or is this just a side-effect of recycling bloated rubbish like Dreamweaver templates, "dynamic drive" dhtml rubbish, or worse, one of the miserable frameworks like mootools or YUI?
 
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