There are a few websites where you can submit original articles to be mass distributed to others as well as retrieve articles for your own use. "Web Articles" is just one of them. As one of the services I may use in the near future, I put a critical eye to the website and looked for flaws in it as well as things I liked.

Articles Directory Categories

According to the front page, there were 1306 articles available when I looked. Without digging any deeper, I saw a problem. Each category and subcategory should show how many articles are listed under them. If I was looking for articles to publish on my blog, I would go after the subcategories with the least amount of articles. They're the subcategories with the least amount of competition.

As it stands now, I have to browse through the subcategories to see how many articles are available under each of them. While there are 4 pages of articles in the Microsoft Office subcategory and 2 pages of MAC related articles, there's only 1 page for Customer service information. I shouldn't have to look to see how many there are.

The Design

Generally, the font sizes are fine for the 1024×768 and lower resolutions, but they appear tiny on my display. An increase of just one pixel size would do wonders for readability.

Most of the font colors are okay, except for the gray on white that's used for text in the instructions. I don't know how it looks on a CRT monitor, but it's hard on my eyes with this LCD display and should be a bit darker.

The layout looks great. There's plenty of white space to separate the content areas. The header banner looks nice and I really like the shades of red being used.

Navigational Items

I didn't see any problems with navigation at all. In fact, I appreciate the separate page for the contact form. Too many websites have their contact page link stuck at the very bottom of each page, in the footer where most people would never look.

I found the instructions on both the submit articles and free content pages easy to read and understand.

My Overall Opinion

This is definitely a web article submission site I'll be using if and when the time comes. For the most part, it's quite user-friendly.