Movie Review Website Seeks Your Thoughts!

Site URL: https://www.thepennmoviegoer.com/

Hi everyone!

We run a student movie review website at https://www.thepennmoviegoer.com/. We recently redesigned the site to make extensive use of blog templates, content tags and a new set of templates.

We'd love to hear what you think we might be able to do better here, specifically around different things we could be doing with our article experiences, and other things we can do to get users to read more than one thing during a visit.

Thanks so much for sharing your thoughts, and for supporting student journalism!

Cheers,

Matt

The nav bar menu is unreadable - choosing overlay fonts is a pain because the is no color that always works. When I use them, I make the image much darker, but you probably don't want distorted images.

There is a code thing to specify the font more than squarespace wants you to, but there is only so much you can do (background colors are the easiest.) 

I would reduce the number of items on the menu - it will make it easier to read and the font color will be less of an issue.  You could make "membership" a button and create a "browse" page.  That way the menu would read "About Us     Events      Browse" heading that takes you to a page that has buttons for every genre and year.

The browse page will be annoying to set up, but you only have to do it once. 

This code is Design - Custom CSS works for me

/* make nav background green and fiddle with size of background*/
.Header-nav--primary {
text-decoration: none;
  background-color: #c2d57c;
  line-height: .2em;
border-right: 10px solid #c2d57c;
border-left: 10px solid #c2d57c;
  }

I think the site looks really solid and polished. It was not overly intuitive to me that these were blog posts that I should click into. Perhaps considering adding a CTA to read more. I understand that you may want a clean look that doesn't include a button, but perhaps even "Read Review → " under the title. 

In the actual articles you have a lot of great content but it may be worth adding headings to keep people engaged. 

Best of luck! 

Great site. I spent quite a bit of time on it. I found a problem with the Oh Brother Where Art Thou? review.  A couple of paragraphs seem to be missing while a couple of others where duplicated. I would love to read the corrected review, it happens to be one of my favorite movies, for a number of reasons. One, I am a huge Old Time and Bluegrass music fan. 

I really liked the site's layout. I would maybe review the text on the images as it can a bit overwhelming and you can't see the image too great (second image down on the home page) so it might be worth downsizing. I would also like to see a "meet the team" under About Us because atm there's only one person added. 

Also, do you think it's worth reducing the amount of options on the navigation and place some of them in the footer? You could have By Genre, Membership and Showtimes & News with search being a magnifying glass and then in the footer, you could have About Us, Events and Archive. 

I am viewing this from a laptop so it may be why it's feeling overwhelming in size.