The Atheist Blogger

So a few people are talking about this new website “Atheist Nexus“. I was invited yesterday by the managing director Thor and I signed up to take a look. Although the site is a very good idea, it is currently very poorly designed. I’d love to comment on all the great things it could do for the community, but before it even tries to connect people it needs to address a load of issues:

• There is far too much code on every page. This bloats the website out which leads to slower loading times as well as slower actual scrolling of the website.
• There is a stupid amount of CSS for the site layout. I’ve been designing websites for years and the site could be made easily with a fraction of the CSS they use.
• The JavaScript is bloated and used way too much. AJAX is great in moderation, but using it for everything only works when you have very tidy and small scripts working together, not a load of large scripts dotted all over the place.
• What is up with the theme? Since when did cityscapes have something to do with atheism? I’m afraid that light blue on white doesn’t go very well for the main links, and they could have saved resources in a load of areas by using color attributes instead of images.

Now I know everyone is getting all excited about a new social networking site, but it’s not new at all, and it certainly isn’t original. A quick look at the source code tells you that the entire site is just linking into ning.com, a “make your own” social networking site. Put simply, this entire project isn’t original, and it hasn’t got a team of devs behind it. It will be updated when ning.com wants to update their entire system.

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