3/25/2010
feedback on this site's design please??
So, as I've been grumbling about for a while now, I am not satisfied with this site's design (and well, who the hell is ever satisfied with anything they made - it's only ever 'good enough' or not good enough). I am going to be migrating this over to WordPress, once I finish getting my first two WordPress sites (acunninghat.com and my webcomic) halfway presentable. I am toying with segregating different topics into distinct feeds, or even seperate sub-blogs (music, design, trains, etc). At the very least I'd like to give you the option to subscribe to sub-feeds selectively (how exactly I should do that I have yet to figure out - yay for google). So, while you won't see any changes here for a bit, what does and doesn't work for you about the current design? Do you want more refined tagging? More discrete categories by topic? How's the basic layout working for you? (debating column number/placement... the current content column is too narrow for many pics/vids, but ideal for text) Suggestions for good WP commenting/threading engines? More Arial? (TRICK QUESTION) More Hello Kitty? (NOT TRICK QUESTION)
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
A few things:
ReplyDeleteSome blogs I've seen use tags to subdivide the blog in useful ways, and have enabled feeds just for specific tags. Presumably you could supplement your current tagging regime with sub-blog specific tags. I am thinking specifically of how this has been implemented on The Hathor Legacy. Their visual design may not be up to your standards, but I think their interface and organization are implemented quite well. Also, it's just a good blog.
In terms of images, there's a few things you can try. Scaling images to your column width, and allowing the reader to click for a larger version works in many contexts. (This is done well on the Gawker sites.) Some sites let large images bleed over to the right (though this only works well if this does not change the width of the text block, and probably would not work well with your current right-hand block, given how wide and long it is.)
In terms of overall design, I think the design could afford to be a little more complex. Once the user has scrolled down past the links block, all they see is text floating in a sea of black. The Gawker sites and The Hathor Leagacy both do this well, if somewhat differently. The idea is to have visual continuity down the length of the page - some sort of pattern the eye can catch.
I would also lighten the body text color a bit. It looks great on your monitor, but gets a bit muddled on cheaper monitors and with certain sub-pixel rendering schemes. (Win XP's ClearType on my computer.) Related to this issue is also font size, which you might consider playing with, for much the same reasons.
I'm sure I could think of other useful criticism, but I can just give that to you in person.