Reviewing www.howtogeek.com

In the third episode of our Genuine Help For Windows 7 series I will review howtogeek.com. This site is one of the biggest destinations for tutorials you will find on the internet. In this review I will try to understand if it is worthy of the fame and attention it receives and share my conclusions.

Ease of use - Good

When you enter the site, you are welcomed by a very good looking theme and a friendly logo. The site menu is structured very well and gives you a good overview of the available content. Also, the search box is very visible and handy to use.

Once you click on a category, you get a long list of titles, split by sub-categories. Unfortunately the lists are very long and hard to follow as there are no visual aids or teasers for each article. Therefore, it is best to use the search box instead of browsing through the long lists of titles.

When you open an article, the content is loaded beneath the main-menu without any interfering ads. After encountering so many websites where you have to search the content through the ads, it is very pleasant to see that there are also good guys who put content first. One thing that might bother you is the fact that, at the bottom of each article, there is a long list of recommended articles from each content category. I think this is a bit too big to scan through. When seeing so many entries I have the tendency to skip everything. If the list would be shorter, I might actually consider reading it and clicking on what interests me. Some optimization could definitely help. As an example, I'm pretty sure that not too many Windows 7 users would be interested in 'Quick Linux Tips' and they could do without those recommendations.

One great thing about How-To Geek is the fact that it has a small number of ads per page. The maximum I encountered was 3 blocks of ads per page. They are also nicely integrated, relevant to the content of the site and, most important, the content has always top priority. You never get the feeling that the owner is more interested in making money than in providing good content.

Ease of understanding - Good

Most of the tutorials on How-To Geek are very easy to understand and follow. The site editors do their best to avoid geeky language which is not understood by less tech-savy audiences. The tutorials are split into clear steps and they don't miss any critical screenshots. Another good thing is the fact that they include downloadable hacks, which make life easy. A good example of this is the tutorial called Disable Aero Shake in Windows 7 which explains how to hack the registry yourself but also provides a downloadable file that you can run and get the same result.

Completeness of tutorials - Good

Another strength of How-To Geek is the completeness of its articles and tutorials. There are no missed steps, additional information is provided when needed, screenshots are always included. The only improvement area I noticed is that some articles which were initially created for Windows Vista and are now valid for Windows 7 too, were not updated very thoroughly. The best example of this is 4 Ways to Make UAC Less Annoying on Windows 7 / Vista. While the article is good and useful, you can clearly see it was made with Windows Vista in mind as Windows 7 is by default less 'annoying'. A better separation of what applies to Windows 7 vs Windows Vista might have been useful in this case.

Original articles - Great

Original content is always a challenge when it come to writing tutorials. You will always see the same topics covered on most sites. However, How-To Geek manages to do a great job at this too. You will see this site managing to come up first with great tips which are featured by many other sites. Some good examples of this are Access Hidden Regional Themes in Windows 7 and How to Drag Files to the Taskbar to Open Them in Windows 7.

howtogeek.com - Genuine Help for Windows 7

Giving the blue badge of Genuine Help for Windows 7 to How-To Geek is one of the easiest decisions I ever made. This site is a great destination from all perspectives. Not only you get a very pleasant browsing experience but you will also find lots of useful content. How-To Geek is one of those web destinations which you should regularly visit for great content on Windows 7.

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