Time has come for a review of Argghhh! The Home Of Two Of Jonah’s Military Guys… Generally try to avoid criticizing heavily armed people, but John and Company at Argghhh! are a good bunch. They are currently averaging 1,519 hits per day.

Style:
At first glance Argghhh! appears to be disorganized and cluttered. This first impression isn’t entirely unfounded. It does have a unique and distinct style though. This style is created by a mixture of military and military inspired colors and images.

The cluttered appearance is caused by two things:

• The first is the sidebars, which are a little too narrow for their content. The use of outlines around all sidebar content items exaggerates this problem.
• The second is the lack of a unified background linking the two sidebars with the content column. While there is a background image, this camouflage pattern showing between the columns leaves all three columns floating and visually unanchored.

The use of color and imagery to give a military air to the site is well done.

I like the use of the rotating images in the header. It gives each of the primary bloggers a chance to have their header in place. It’s a nice touch.

Structure:
Argghhh! has an entirely CSS layout. It’s CSS is a little simpler than I might have done, but I wouldn’t consider that a negative. The CSS and site structure are more than adequate and should reliably present the site in any modern browser. Load time is high with 55.14 seconds on DSL or 179.13 seconds on 56K modem. This is quite long by blog standards and should be improved upon. A lot of the load time is caused by non-optimized images and images loading from other locations.

The site could use some updating however. Mostly small changes to the templates and CSS to make things load a little smoother. The site is using some depracated code, and would be better served with some updates.

Content:
The content is what you’d expect from a group of intelligent and well spoken ex-military guys. Their writing is about the military and subjects of interest to those who are or have been in the military. Due mostly to quality writing and humor, and despite it’s obvious military theme, this site appeals to a wide range of people. It is a great source of military history, thought, and opinion.

What would I change:
I’d update the structure to make it more compliant with current web standards. A site with this much traffic needs to work well.

I’d optimize images in an effort to decrease load time. I’d also bring as many images as possible that are loading from remote sites into this site. This should also lower load time.

Alter sidebar images, or the sidebars themselves in an effort to keep contents from overlapping outside of the sidebars.

Remove all or most of the outlines on objects within the sidebars in an effort to give them a more organized and structured appearance.

Make some minor changes to the sidebar styles in order to improve their usability.

Add a unifying background between columns. This will ground the columns and give the site a more unified and organized appearance.

Make some small improvements to the CSS in an effort to accentuate the current style. The style is interesting and very appropriate for the site, but could be better. I’d make it more of what it is, not something different.

I’d look into improving the performance of the rotating header images. Possibly with identical function, possibly with something slightly different. I’m not sure if it would be beneficial, but it’s worth considering if I could maintain or improve function while improving load time.

I’d add High Desert Wanderer to the Argghhh! blogroll, because… I could. Hey, if we’re considering hypothetical changes, why skimp?

Summary:
Argghhh! is a site with an interesting style and quality content. It could though, stand some structural and stylistic improvements. Load time is unnecessarily high and needs to be improved upon. The thing to keep in mind is that this is a functioning site. It may not be the best looking, but it already has good traffic. Any improvements should focus on improving function while maintaining and improving the current style. Care should be taken not to sacrifice current function for future improvement.