This is a (paid) review of CreditDemystified.com, a website for providing you with simple answers to complicated credit questions.
Developed in Wordpress by Netconcepts, for Countrywide Home Loans, CreditDemystified.com is a resource for anyone who has questions about credit and debt. In this review I take a look at the site's design, features and content.
Theres no denying it, wordpress is a great tool for delivering content to the user and has many SEO benefits. This has clearly been utilised in the design of CreditDemystified since it contains all sorts of features such as tag clouds and good dynamic page titles. It looks like a lot of emphasis has been placed on content, and getting the content to the user.
The content is reasonably easy to navigate, and an RSS feed can be found for easier access to the latest articles.
The header banner is really attention grabbing/friendly and pulls you in to read the sites blurb:
The team at CreditDemystified.com is dedicated to providing you with simple answers to complicated credit questions. Free articles, workbooks, plus links to home loan options.
The language and imagery used gives a nice friendly feel to the site, and makes you want to get stuck in to the content. The content itself is packed with loads of useful information and articles about credit ratings and other related subjects. A thumbs up for the content as a whole.
When you go into a sub-section of the site the header image changes into a shorter version; I liked how it did this as It allowed more space for the content you were viewing.
A nice feature of the website is the "Credit Quotient Quiz" where you can test your credit knowledge, this section is well put together. I scored "4 to 6 correct = Average Credit Quotient", hooray.
After doing the test, the site suggests resources to look at to learn more information, very nice.
The design
Design-wise the site has a few issues such as non-validating markup, and in some places looks unpolished due to spacing/padding issues (the header for instance felt very cramped). There was also a lack of active states on the navigation buttons, making it a little harder to know where you are in the site, although a breadcrumb (textual display of the page your are on in relation to the homepage) was shown.
Flash is utilised for important messages and eye catching graphics, I like the fact it wasn't over-used on the page. The flash animations themselves look a high quality and are visually appealing.
The text was quite easy to read, since it has a good amount of contrast, however I felt the font was a little bit too cramped and small and could use some additional line-height/font size.
I liked the presence of the print friendly page link, making it easier to get a good printout of the content, something overlooked on many sites.
My verdict
CreditDemystified.com, while having some design issues, is an excellent resource full of valuable content, a good implementation of wordpress, and contains some very good SEO practices. A little tweaking and validation of the template would be the icing on the cake.
I rate it 6/10.
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