That there, the first page of Refurber you see, the first thing I notice is that the page is a little too wide for my screen. Maybe its because I'm surfing from a laptop with a maximum resolution of 1024x768 but since over half the world's computers are using that resolution, maybe the site should be designed with it in mind.. unless there's just something screwy with my browser.

Just a random second thought, but I am really glad the site wasn't named refurbr, the "drop vowels before r's at the end of words" thing is over-used.

The "first visit?" button seems to be the logical place to start, and its a nice touch to have one, it goes through to a quick info page of what I'm likely to want from Refurber, including register, which brings me along to this:

Well, the page width is still just a little too much but there's nothing too important in the 20 or so pixels I'm missing. The registration details required are fairly standard and so I'm quickly registered.

See, registered, nice and easy. Although now, it gets a little less easy-feeling, I'm suddenly faced with a whole lot of choices, I don't know what effect this has later or how rigidly you're kept in these groups so I don't really know whether I should tick everything, take a more minimal route or what to do.

Oh well, I chose some interesting looking ones and moved on, hopefully I'll able to add to them later if I need some advice outside of those groups.

Moving right along, I answer the confirmation email, and I'm automatically logged in, another nice touch, plus points for that.

Continue the tour through some of the suggestions

Now let's check on that groups thing, if I make use of that link to my profile can I change those options?

The short answer, yes. Along with all kinds of other profile options that go well beyond the standard set of features. The sidebar's more than doubled in size with all of the profile stuff expanded out (more plus points)

And now, I think it's time to take a look at the whole point of Refurber, DIY advice.

As a sidenote, I'm mildly impressed with the sidebar, it's got all the options available at a single mouse click. Nice centralised navigation, which may not be anything revolutionary but its still a problem in some sites that take half a dozen clicks to get anywhere

Anyway, onwards to "Read Advice"

Although they decided against the sucky part of web 2.0 (the dropped vowels) they do have the better features with a prominent tag cloud and some featured entries.

Right below that, the advice begins

The list view is compact and gives a high information density, so finding an article won't take too much scrolling, although the "wall-of-text" effect does make it slightly daunting, I'm not sure where to start looking

Looks like its search-box to the rescue, good search is an essential for anything that's going to have a lot of information to look through so let's find out how good it is at matching a general query to some specific advice it is.

See that article, "painting deep colours and getting good results"? As a test, let's see if "dark coloured paint" finds it despite the difference in wording (it may not be a very strenuous test but if I was looking for that advice then that's what I would search for)

Test passed – it was the top result and came with several other useful looking pieces of advice (as well as quite a few that just mentioned paint, which is fair enough – I can't really demand that level of specificity and still expect it to find everything of use)

To round off my tour of Refurber I went for a blitz run on all the other areas of the site that are slightly apart from the main business of advice articles

- Q&A

There's not that much in this section yet, but being able to ask questions as well as write advice articles will be helpful for getting some tips if no-one's written an advice article for your particular problem yet

- Groups

A forum-style section to conduct a little socialising, there's a topic for every one of the groups available to choose from at the beginning, and it seems like there's one for chat that's specific to every known country on the planet, which dominates the list a bit, although as the community grows the number of country-topics will diminish in comparison.

- Photos

Another useful thing for the site to have, a space to upload photos of your building project in progress to supplement articles or questions

- Activity

All the latest and greatest advice and questions, not sure when I would use it but maybe if I was a DIY wiz looking to answer all the newest questions...

- Members

A list of everyone on Refurber, designed as a central location to find the people to interact with to get advice

and thats Refurber.

To sum up, its a potentially very handy place to go for advice on DIY. The attention to detail means that all the features you could want are just a click away, but be sure to come prepared with plenty of pixels 

hmm... now if I can just get my font size sorted out (it keeps the same formatting as in Word)

actually.. no it doesn't, the font size seems to be locked (I changed the size and recopied the first paragraph but the size didn't actually change)

thanks for the detailed review

was very interesting to read.

not sure about the page width - wil have to look into that

by the way refurbr.com redirects you to refurber.com

On the page width thing, if it helps, I was using Firefox on Windows

...as you could probably tell from the Windows toolbar and the bar saying "Refurber ... - Mozilla Firefox" at the top of the window in the screenshot 

Nice review SK. I want to try and walk through it from  DIY guy point of view, I'll try and do a screencast but need to grab the five minutes to do it.

SK - do you think it competes with blogs on the subject? 

In answer to your question Mick...

I would always go to a site like this before trawling through blogs. That's just a personal thing. I want my info in one spot and easy to get back to in a week when I need something else answered.  

I don't surf the net and use it very much as a tool to get things done in my everyday life.

Will have a proper look at the site now... 

Here's my quick review:

http://bjtitus.net/blog/2007/06/refurber.html

I'll have a screencast up late so check back.

If I found a blog with as much focused information as this, maybe it could compete, but as soon as I have to wade through "this is something funny my cat did" and "hey look at this unrelated site" to find the useful stuff then a dedicated site wins.

A blog would also suffer from the fact that it only has one person submitting articles instead of a community producing them (yes there are comments, but the blog owner has to make the article first) 

The social community is definitely a better option for finding this kind of information than blogs. At least for the time being. There is still really no great way to find exceptional blogs on various subjects. I doubt there are too many blogs talking about the do-it-yourself market who post as often as Refurber seems to be updated.

However, when blogs can be easily found and easily tracked (RSS feeds and readers do this, but most users don't know how to operate these features), the dedicated social network may become too difficult to use as blogs are more lightweight and often have more intelligent and thorough content.

hi guys good discussion regarding refurber v DIY blogs.

one other thing to consider... we have ranking of articles... so you can just read the top ranked advice if you want rather than really 100 crappy blog posts before you find a good one.