CNET.com is the definitive online location for gadgets, internet and computer news, tech information and reviews. CNET.com is also the primary destination of online enthusiasts seeking the latest downloads and trials of new or popular programs. With so much to offer on a single website, could it possibly be easy to navigate? Oh yes – simple to navigate and much more.

A Classic Example of Web 2.0 Design

The colors, clean design and simple layout of CNET make it easy to follow and even easier to find what you’re looking for as you navigate the site. Tabs for the different areas of the site are a bright green in contrast to the pale yellow and white of the content and listings sections. The homepage is primarily comprised of listed stories, blog posts and review categories. The site is designed with an emphasis on showcasing a clean list using plenty of white space rather than attempting to cram every article onto the home page. The starkness of the pages is a welcome respite as there is little fluff and virtually no descriptions or teasers for the stories that you often find cluttering up other news related sites.

By keeping the story list to headlines, CNET allows visitors to skim the topics quickly without getting tangled up in related sub stories and photojournalism enhancements. Reading through the latest topics takes just seconds. Most of stories listed CNET’s homepage are breaking news or thoughtful, well-researched discussion of the technology industry happenings, the bottom half of the homepage showcases the almost endless number of CNET blogs covering a wide range of topics and industries.

A Wide Range of Technology Blogs on CNET

The latest blog posts are listed on the bottom of the homepage and featured post titles are pulled and rotate through the homepage list keeping content absolutely up to minute. All CNET blogs are listed on the homepage making it simple to find what you’re looking for in a single step. The CNET homepage also contains special offers and promoted articles on the right and bottom edges of the page, but these don’t make the site feel cluttered. In fact, you almost don’t notice the extra content. The ads and boxes provide a visual border for the crisp white areas which are so effective at showcasing the deceptively simplistic lists of content. (more…)

Forbes.com does what many other news websites fail to accomplish. Forbes.com brings you a complete source of both online information, discussion and commentary on how that information affects the marketplace and you. Forbes.com is not only news, but thorough analysis of what that news means to the markets, the economy and industry and services. Very few websites offer this much information, and only one can claim to be the business information leader Forbes.com.

Overflowing with Information

Forbes.com is a site simply bursting with information. To view the complete homepage you must scroll and read quite a bit, but the sheer volume of insightful articles more than makes up for the required scrolling. At least the most important and most recent of the many articles are listed at the top of the homepage making navigation a bit easier. On the homepage, ads and the many other Forbes business lines compete for space with seemingly every article written on the site in the last month. The homepage is long and saturated with articles and content, but there is not a single wasted area.

The content of the site is divided into related areas of business with new stories being featured each week or sooner for each category. Within each grouping, the feature story and related stories are listed for easy navigation along with teasers for each. Content is divided into sections such as Business, Tech, Markets, Leadership and Personal Finance. The feature story of each section and related stories are provided in boxes on the home page, and again on the sub page for the section. Sub pages are easily accessed from a menu bar at the top of the page. (more…)

At first glance, the Environment Web Directory at www.webdirectory.com has something to be desired. The site is first a collection of links in manageable categories related to environmental issues. Underneath the neatly arranged categories, however, are a rather odd assortment of links with descriptions. Some are related still to the environment while others, such as payday loans, seem completely out of place. The extra collection of links are almost missing a title or category such as “Featured Links” to let the visitor know what it is he’s looking at.

At the very bottom of the homepage is yet another list of links only marginally related to the site purpose. These lists are site wide as well, appearing as a separate list even on the “Other Places to Search” page which does contain quality environmentally related links. If these questionable links were removed leaving only the bona fide categories and related searches, the Environment Wed Directory would be off to a much more authentic start as a quality directory. As it is, one can only hope that the links are providing the financial backing for the site allowing the owners to pull together a terrific collection of environmentally related links.

The Environment Web Directory fills an obvious niche as it seeks to collect authoritative links on various aspects of the environment. According to the information page (also flooded with unrelated links) the staff of the Environment Web Directory numbers twenty-three and comes together in the basement of a music store to search out and list the best environmental sites available.

In the actual directory portion of the homepage, the environmental links are broken down into the same kinds of categories present on most directories. Only with the focus on the environment topics for the categories have a decidedly greener feel. In fact the entire website is green – in every sense of the word. Categories range from weather to energy to pollution with an impressive collection of sub categories under each. (more…)

The sister site of DMOZ, Open-site.org, is an internet community project designed to accumulate and distribute trusted information with no charge. Open-site is a collection of articles on everything from dust mites to SEO with editors checking to ensure the content is of the quality required by the site as well as being free of slant or propaganda.

While this concept sounds a lot like the overwhelmingly popular Wikipedia, there are critical differences.
Open-site.org is set up on a CMS platform, not a wiki. The open-site framework is much closer to that of a true online encyclopedia, not a wiki. Open-site.org does make it clear that they are neither a dictionary nor an encyclopedia, however. The site considers itself a “informational, volunteer-based web-site”.

Of course, it may not be written by scientists and specialists in the field, but editors must be approved before they can add or change content and even then, that content must be approved by a senior editor. The public can’t modify information at all without applying and being approved as editors. The site is also organized by category, much like a print encyclopedia might be making it simple to browse from one category to another and find related information. (more…)

The Best of the Web, or BOTW as it is called in internet marketing circles, is the Internet’s oldest web directory. It pioneered the concept of awarding quality sites with recognition, and in fact this was its premise during the site’s initial six years.

Founded in 1994, Best of the Web was designed to showcase websites that were nominated and then voted as the best of a category. Brandon Plewe, the founder, included many categories, and the site was very successful. Party planning and housing issues were listed along side financial websites and online magazines. However after 1998, the site lay dormant for years until it was sold and refurbished in 2002.

Currently, BOTW is a general paid directory that allows only quality websites and removes spam. It is still as progressive today as it was in 1994, but there are many more directories available to compete with. Of course, there is not actually much competition at all from these other directories as Best of the Web is known to provide quality listings without the garbage that search engines often offer up. (more…)

The Starting Point Directory is another old directory that had a great beginning, a rough patch down the road, but is currently one of the most respected directories around. Starting Point is a human edited paid directory that lists premier listings from Google along with paid submissions from webmasters. The directory is careful to include only quality listing to maintain its reputation in the industry.

Starting Point was founded in 1995 by early online pioneer Frank Addante, where it was designed to be both a search engine and directory. The two still overlap today. Initially, the Starting Point Directory had a unique feature which had to do with voting links on the pages listed in the site. Websites with high numbers of votes from visitors would receive a hot site award and actually be profiled in the directory.

During the last few years of the twentieth century, the popularity of the site grew until it was one of the largest directories around. Yesmail.com purchased the website in 1997, but did little with it until the site was resold to Techlabs, Inc in 1999. Unfortunately, Techlabs did not have a use for or desire to refurbish the website, so Starting Point languished for a few years. Finally, Starting Point was sold to a new owner who brought back the original polish of the site in 2006. (more…)

Rackspace is the globally recognized web hosting company that is into the web hosting business since the year 1998 and ever since its introduction into the market it has grown itself by more than fifty percent every year. Today, Rackspace has the customer base with more than hundred thousand users across the globe operating with more than seven major data centers in several parts of the world. Rackspace has managed to earn a strong reputation amongst the masses by delivering corporate leveled web solutions and is successfully managing the businesses of all types and sizes. Rackspace employs the best available technological equipments for all of their customer needs and also presents a strong and effective support through the company’s award winning expert staff.

Rackspace has successfully crossed an important business milestone of surpassing hundred thousand users with its global messaging portfolio along with its suite of email and messaging tools. It is known for its integrated email accounts portfolio and delivers highly efficient four level enterprise messaging services. It can also provide email or messaging services in response to the specific customer demands. (more…)

Out of all the web hosting companies existing on the World Wide Web today, HostGator is supposed to be the fastest growing company. This company was formed in the year 2002, five years back. It is also the most talked about web host on the internet today. It has a review of hosting about twenty thousand domains today on their own servers. The HostGator infrastructure is located in the state of Texas in United States. It has its own data centers located there itself. Considering its gigantic services and magnanimous infrastructure it is often termed as the “Giga Hosts”. They have a reputation of delivering more than they claim to. This web hosting company operates on the Linux based web hosting and lately it has been heard that the Linux servers work on the Red Hat version 9.

It works on the Cpanel environment which is believed to be one of the highly popular web hosting administration panel software package. It is known for its features and ease of use. HostGator offers a number of hosting packages right from the shared hosting plans to dedicated servers to various websites. The shared hosting and the reseller plans come in very good deals but this web hosting company is usually well admired for the dedicated server hosting packages. (more…)

DreamHost has been the hosting company from about seven long years and ever since its inception, it has hosted probably more than sixty thousand websites and still continues to offer some pretty simple and cost effective hosting solutions. They are known to provide customized solutions according to the needs of clients with different functional sizes. DreamHost today, has built up a community of clients and they ensure progressive growth with its efficient customer service and equally stable hosting service. DreamHost is believed to have a lot of attractive features with the most convenient hosting packages that very frequently make the clients of the other hosting companies switch over to this one.

DreamHost is believed to give the highest value for your finances than you would ever expect. The hosting packages with DreamHost start from as low as eight dollars and then it also includes hosting solutions with all the general features as well as some of the features that are available only with DreamHost. It provides all the necessary tools that one can’t even think of having while associating with some other web hosting company. Apart from all these attractive features, it has the most user friendly support staff that works round the clock to facilitate a trouble free web hosting experience. The most fundamental plan with the DreamHost hosting company is called the “Crazy Domain Insane”. This plan is out in the market for as low as eight dollars and then it contains a superlative disk space of about 200GB along with a magnanimous data transfer limit that is approximately 2000GB. These data transfer limits are most unreachable except for the intricate busy websites. This is as good as getting a customized special scheme. The features that are available with DreamHost are much better and lengthier than the features available with any other hosting company on the floor today. They also go as far as offering a package of 600 emails that inculcate an unlimited use of mail and domain forwarding with scripts like PHP, MySQL, CGI and loads of other features like Jabber supporting it. (more…)

Lunarpages is the web hosting company that started in the mid of the year 2000 when the AddNet Corporation expanded its hosting solutions to inculcate the shared hosting solutions. Prior to that AddNet Corporation was providing small and large scale managed or unmanaged hosting services for about three years. AddNet, due to its rock solid focus on customer satisfaction expanded itself and then Lunarpages was introduced. Lunarpages is the by product of continuing exceptional hosting services and brand value that was previously cultivated by the AddNet Corporation. Their effortless hosting solutions have increased their customer base by serving all the hosting needs on one single platform. Lunarpages is believed to have the finest infrastructure with its office located in the state of California. The up-to-the-minute technology is located in the data center of the Lunarpages office in Los Angeles. They present the greatest level of safety, redundancy, reliability and security. Their technology is built with the latest technical giants like Dell, Cisco network equipments and Sun Microsystems. The cable and wireless technologies are devised by the Global Crossing, Mzima networks and Verio/NTT architecture. It lives up to the highest standards of scalability and technological advances. (more…)