User Comments

Much depends on what you like yourself i guess: do you want the site with some more images or not? You might also a bit play with the background color, adding a border here and there… once you experimentinig start experimenting i’m sure things will fall in place. That’s how i came up with my personal site (not saying it’s that awesome but i liked it at the time :-) )

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I have considered adding more colour. I have also thought about using a fixed-width design.

I don’t really want to add more images as I’m trying to keep the site streamlined and quick.

I am very happy with the functionality and, being a programmer, it’s easy for me to add new features and change existing ones - it’s purely the visual aspect that bothers me.

Your site is pretty eye-catching Luc. I visit regularly to keep up with your CSS experiments. I love some of the templates you have made available (maybe I should use one of those as a starting point). I also think the W-orx website is beautiful - that’s the sort of image I’m talking about!

Anyway, thanks for dropping by Luc and for your suggestions. I’ll continue to play around with it, until it “clicks”.

At the moment i’m a bit busy to add some new stuff but i have some in the pipeline ;-).

Of course you can use one of the templates, that’s what they are there for.

Remember, sometimes is little things that can add some jazz to a site: it doesn’t always have to be some big overhaul :-)

My own personal advice would be to try and not do a fixed width and not use shadows (i.e. try and do something different).

Though I tried and failed. The combination of the two is just too much fun these days.

Luc gives some good advice. Perhaps with some simple changes here you can take it to another level?

Deltatangobravo is a nice full width site, perhaps there you can find some inspiration?

Luc: You’re right. It could be that little adjustments will make all the difference. I appreciate that I should avoid a complete makeover wherever possible (look what happened to mezzoblue). So, I should consider a gradual transition to a better design, so that the impact on visitors is minimised.

Mike P.: deltatangobravo is certainly bold and very clean. Red is not one of my preferred colours but it does work well on that site.

I know that there are arguments for and against fixed width designs. Personally, I prefer websites that are fluid - and, to date, I have used a fluid design here.

However, some of my pages have long, long paragraphs - and these are tedious to read on a high-resolution screen with a maximised browser.

I could just say, “sod it - let the user resize his browser,” but that feels wrong!

The biggest problem here is that I can’t visualise how these pages should look, so this design is kind of kludgy.

With the front page, I knew exactly what I wanted and the finished page mirrors that completely. I am totally happy with the home page.

Back to the drawing board…

“However, some of my pages have long, long paragraphs - and these are tedious to read on a high-resolution screen with a maximised browser.”

Maybe a solution could be that you “divide” your pages: whenever you think the content becomes to much, add a “read here more” link to another page?

“Maybe a solution could be that you “divide” your pages: whenever you think the content becomes to much, add a “read here more” link to another page?”

This already applies to my longer articles (see: http://tinyurl.com/2hkq2) - even then, there are some excruciatingly large bodies of text. I need to change my whole style of writing!

Arrgghhh!!!!

Looking for inspiration:

http://www.cssvault.com/
http://www.coolhomepages.com/
http://www.oswd.org/

Any others I should look at?

http://www.cssbeauty.com/

Nice minimalistic look

“I need to change my whole style of writing!”

Use CSS shorthand ;-)

cssbeauty is nice - but all those boxes?

However, looking through the archives, I found a few designs that I really liked:

http://jogin.com/weblog/
http://www.suspiremedia.co.uk/
http://www.photoblog.net/

From my own bookmarks:

http://www.ryanbrill.com/
http://binarybonsai.com/
http://superfluousbanter.org/
http://www.fiftyfoureleven.com/sandbox/weblog/

Finally, for the gorgeous, animated header:

http://the.taoofmac.com/space/

All of these are inspirational websites for me (from a design point of view). I have taken ideas from them and implemented them here - yet I still have a bland website!

As you have pointed out, I need to experiment, tweak and manipulate. One day, hopefully, I’ll be able to sit back and be happy with my this website - but that day is not today.

Thanks for the input.

“All of these are inspirational websites for me (from a design point of view). I have taken ideas from them and implemented them here - yet I still have a bland website!”

I think you suffer from something a lot of designers suffer. Because you tend to look each day at your personal site and make entries,… you soon tend to look at it as a “plain” site. You spend hours on developing, testing.. and in the end it isn’t “new” anymore. But that doesn’t mean others don’t like it.

I have the same problem with my site but if i had to redo it each time i was bored with it or think it doesn’t look catchy enough anymore, i would be redoing it each week.

The first time i visited your page i thought it had a nice catchy minimalistic side but now i tend to look at the content not the eyecatching.

Maybe it is a better idea, instead of asking how you could improve it, asking your visitors plain simple “does the site need a new layout” and give them only the opportunity to says yes or no.

There are only a couple of things that I don’t like about your design:

1 - your post text is all in italics on your permalink pages. It makes it harder to read.

2 - the body text font and menu font are a little smaller than I’d like, but when I size up the text, it starts breaking the design a bit.

3 - many of your images on top use very warm color palettes, which clash with the very cool colors you use for everything else. Not sure what you might want to do about that one, whether you’d want to restrict your pool of header pictures or not.

Luc: You are absolutely right. Now that I come to think about it, I was delighted with this design when I first launched it. I have only become disenchanted with it as time has gone by.

Interestingly, I very rarely look at the front page - and that’s the one that I still enjoy!

You suggest that I ask for the opinion of my visitors and, again, I am in agreement - that was part of my intention with this article, I guess I need to learn to be more direct! :-)

Jennifer: Thanks for the feedback. I have removed the italics from the permalink pages as per your suggestion.

I can see how the navigation font could be considered too small (a bad move for such an important element) and I will experiment with this in the near future. However, I’m surprised that you feel that the body text is too small. Of course, as with all design, this is a subjective thing. Therefore, I will apply Luc’s “test” and ask my readership.

Finally Jennifer, regarding the image colours, one option I tested when putting this design together used monochromatic header images (the same collection of images but grayscaled). I could try this out on my visitors. I could also try using images with a tint (sepia anyone?). Again, I guess I need to ask the audience…

Thank you both for making me feel a little bit more positive about this template and for you suggestions for possible improvements. I really appreciate your ideas and I now have something to work with.

It can only get better! :-)

I have question, why do you strip all html from comments? It is frustrating not to be able to hyperlink text and use basic styles (strong, em, etc).
I suggest that you remove this restriction to make your site a little more user friendly. Please, please, please!!!!

“…why do you strip all html from comments?”

I chose to do this to ensure that visitors wouldn’t post broken XHTML which would prevent these pages from validating.

I appreciate that this is a problem for some visitors and I have been working away on a solution, in the background. I might be able to allow a limited subset of XHTML soon.

Is there much demand for this? Let me know.

“I have been working away on a solution”

That’s cool. Thank you.

Well, I am using a very high resolution (1600 by 1200), which explains why the font appears small to me. :)

Never, ever make assumptions about your users!

“…I am using a very high resolution (1600 by 1200)…”

This is something I didn’t make allowances for. I use 1280 x 1024 (which is as high a resolution as I can get from this system) and I had assumed, believe it or not, that very few visitors would exceed that resolution.

Now I sympathise Jennifer. Looking around the site, I can see that there is much which must be virtually unreadable to you.

I am going to have to take a long, hard look at the choices I have made with this design now. :-(

One thing I have noticed is that it is hard here in the comments and on your homepage to discern 1.{between posts} and 2.{between comments}.

The spacing is all somewhat equal; perhaps lighlty coloring alternating comments or something along those lines.

For the posts, hmm, it must be the width of the posts and the Trebuchet that makes it hard for me.

Mike P.: I am definitely going to abandon Trebuchet. Any suggestions as to what I should use in it’s place? Should I go with the extremely safe, but boring, “arial, verdana, helvetica, sans-serif”?

I have noted your points regarding spacing and seperation of comments and posts. I have a little tweak for the posts which I will apply soon. Then I’ll see what I can do with the comments.

“…I am using a very high resolution (1600 by 1200)…”

Wow, that is a way out of an average resolution, mostly used by tech designers. An average of 1% on the web uses such a high resolution.

It is extremely high isn’t it. Must render 90%+ of the web unusable!

Jennifer, do you run your browser full-screen very often?

Imagine a site with a fixed with and then having the browser full-screen. Wow!

Or two browser windows side by side! I have two TFTs, imagine… 3200 x 1200 pixels of screen real estate! (drool)

Dude, if you get encouraged, discouraged, here’s a reminder:

“A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.” - Douglas Adams

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Ain’t that the truth!

I have to say that I am feeling better about the site as a whole now. The comments posted here (the largest number for any of my articles to date) have been hugely encouraging.

I appreciate now that I should make wide-scale changes with extreme caution and only after consultation. I have also realised that I should never again go live with a new design without offering a preview and without soliciting comments first.

The feedback this article has generated will be my guide as I evolve the existing design, rather than create a new one.

I have had my eyes opened to the things that frustrate my visitors and to those that work.

My plan now is to address the issues that have been raised here and, as I make (subtle) changes, I will request your feedback to ensure that I always move in the right direction.

My belief that the “customer is always right” has been validated. I will listen to each and every one of you. This might not be the most gorgeous website on the Internet, but it sure as hell can become one of the most user-friendly.

I can’t thank you all enough for your input. If you’re ever in my neighbourhood…

Well, i for one just like the site as it is on a whole :-)

The lay-out of a personal site depends also on the purpose of your site: mine is all about CSS so nnot not using heavy CSS stuff would of course not go well lol.

And i might take you up one day on that invitation … England is just a hop over the Channel for me :-)

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“England is just a hop over the Channel for me”

And vice versa… Lock up your wives and daughters, DarkBlue’s heading for the Chunnel (http://tinyurl.com/3d5ux)…

Hey guys!

I have made a few changes to the website in-line with the comments some of you previously made here.

The changes I have made have been to the typography only and I’d be grateful if you could review them and offer your opinions/suggestions/hate mail/etc before I apply them site-wide.

THE PROBLEMS

Jennifer Grucza didn’t like my use of italic text or the small body text. Jennifer also pointed out that the main navigation font was particularly small.

Mike P. found it difficult to isolate individual comments and weblog summaries due to the minimal seperation I was employing between each item.

Both Mike P. and Andrei Herasimchuk bemoaned the fact that I had used Trebuchet as my primary font.

THE CHANGES

Italic text has been removed.
Font size in main navigation has been increased.
I have replaced Trebuchet with Arial for my primary font.
Many font sizes have been increased.
Spacing has increased considerably between individual comments and weblog entries. I have also made a couple of other tweaks to improve visual seperation of items.

I have also changed the link scheme in the major text (nobody commented on this, but I wasn’t happy with the previous version). Unvisited links are now more clearly distinguishable from their visited brethren.

SOLICITATION

Could you please review the changes and let me know what you think?

Nice going dude :-)

Much improved, I think. Reads very well at 800 width (roughly the width of Opera for me with my mail sidebar open).

That’s great. I’m so glad you approve.

I must admit, looking through the pages now, I am beginning to agree with Luc’s assertion that, “it doesn’t always have to be some big overhaul.” I have changed less than ten lines of CSS to achieve this.

The gurus were right! Seperating content from presentation REALLY DOES WORK! :-)

” I have changed less than ten lines of CSS to achieve this”

One of the manny splendored things about CSS :-)
Although i don’t know why somebody had a problem with the Trebuchet font.

“i don’t know why somebody had a problem with the Trebuchet font”

I questioned it too. But, I have to say, the site looks “crisper” without it.

Luc, you’ll be pleased to know that I am happy with my website again. :-)

Luc, you’ll be pleased to know that I am happy with my website again. :-)

:-) back

I am happy with my website again. :-)

What the heck, I wasn’t that happy after all. I went ahead and redesigned (again).

Now I’m happy!