Read the feedback and we worked on it. Thanks for your help and we now have a brand new layout.  Cleaner, more organized, and more lively.

http://push-start.co.uk/

Most of your images are hot-linked from other sites. I'd also suggest that you scale your images to the proper proportions when you're using them in an article.

Practically all images in this Red Dead Redemption review are being pulled from other sites => http://push-start.co.uk/archives/category/archives/7420

Some of the images are 1920x1080 when they're only being displayed at a fraction of that.

See the Halo Reach release article. The image used us 1920x1080 put the post scales that down to just 135x75 pixels.

Yeah, we are fixing the image stretch issues now. We knew it was an issue and just had to figure out why.

I quite like the design, but yeah, they images used for the articles don't fit or they're too stretched.

A really common template u used there, dont know how your site looked before, but this looks a lot like a lot of other sites I`ve seen before. Also, I think your editors need some more html/css knowledge to better edit the articles images-wise (http://push-start.co.uk/archives/category/archives/7380 - for example, very clumsy image insertion in the article).

Other than that, i dont see any real changes you made to the popular template, other then the logo in the header which looks good. I would consider changing the font in the logo to a sans-serif font dough.

There's some basic editing that probably needs to take place with your articles as well. Writers missing stuff like the difference between "your" and "you're" worries me.

It looks an awful like http://www.gamespot.com/

Believe me I've gotten on them about that. I'm the only editor and I just cant look everything.

And we know it looks like Gamespots. Doesn't phase us all that much really. It's good for now, and until we can afford to get someone to make a website for us, this will do the job!

Thanks for the comments everyone. Keep em comin!

The layout looks good. I'm not sure about the colours but I do like the fact that you can change it from light to dark. Because of the schemes I would check that colour blind people can read the content properly. The images need to be adjusted and I would probably do what we did over at our site in the staff forums; create a dummy proof guide to make sure that you're all working off the same page.

I would also get people familiar with simple graphics programs like gimp and make sure that they all use them to resize images to the correct size, and not use the scaler in wordpress. All images should also be uploaded to your servers and not hosted elsewhere, which just makes your image editing look sloppy.

In terms of grammar and spelling I would not only pull up every staff member on it, but I would also say that if its not proofed and the correct grammar is not used; then it doesn't go up. Its better to have nothing go up and to keep consistency on the site, than to have something to go up that's sub-par. I would also look for someone to proof read as a dedicated job title, and have a bare minimum of 2 people able to publish articles. I also have a rule that nobody proofs their own stuff, this is because you grow accustomed to your own mistakes, regardless of how excellent your spelling and grammar is.

You want to ask yourself one question, which would you rather have? 20 articles that go up in one day that has loads of errors, or one article that has none?

No matter how good you are though, you won't catch everything but better to have less content with a higher quality control than loads of content with none at all.

At www.thisismyjoystick.com we publish a couple of articles a day if that, and keep the high quality, rather than allowing loads published that are incorrectly proofed and edited. I take quality over quantity any day. If you have a lot of staff like we do, make sure that you have people there to cover the editing and proofing accordingly. If you can't find anyone straight away I would suggest that you do the proofing and do no writing till you can safely say that its covered.

A lot of the articles I have seen have no comments on them and you want to push to get people commenting. Even if its another staff member, it will entice other people to join the debate. Comments aren't everything, but they do serve as good feedback on your content.

I would move the sign up and log on widget towards the top of the page too, so that there is a clear indication of where to sign up. At present its about half way down and I didn't see it immediately.

On the staff pages most of the images are broken too and I would also put the link to each writers portfolio there too.

Just a few bits I have noticed and I hope that you will find my feedback useful.

I'll just feedback on the design, as this is something I see time and time again.

On first visit it is really obvious that the header doesn't fit with the design as a whole. It immediately made me think not-your-own WordPress theme (as Igor mentioned) - Yamidoo Pro. It appears the only original part you designed is the logo.

There is nothing wrong at all with WordPress, it's a brilliant platform. It's just that using an uncustomised theme is the easy option and makes you look like a bunch of other sites. It isn't a "brand new layout" when any site can legally achieve the same thing in a matter of minutes.

I can understand why some sites take this shortcut, but why not seek out a student designer/developer who might want to add to their portfolio on a voluntary basis?

Whether the theme is original or not, it's important to take the time to ensure you make the most of the layout. Having random heights on the four images on the home page is a glaring lack of attention to detail.