critique my blog

It doesn't matter if you do all the error checking in the world, or if you have the most beautiful graphics, if your site or application design isn't usable, it's not going to do well. Get input and advice on usability and user interface issues here.

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Luke
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critique my blog

Post by Luke »

Hey guys, I'm wrapping up the design for my new blog. I know it's definitely not perfect yet, so please be as critical as you can.

http://lukevisinoni.com/

The secondary pages don't really have much content on them yet, but mainly I just want comments about the color scheme, the layout, etc. Thanks guys.

EDIT: Oh yea, and don't mind the posts and comments, they are just some useless stuff I threw on there to fill space so I could see how it would look with actual articles and comments. I plan on using the blog for just web development posts and updates on my libraries (or lack there-of) in the future. :)
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Eran
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Re: critique my blog

Post by Eran »

Hey man, it looks great! clean layout, I like the color palette, navigation integrates very nicely - good job!

I have really small comments -
1. I would like to see the time the post was published, in addition to the date. It is sometimes useful to see when the comments appeared in relation to the time it was posted.
2. The font sizes could be a tad larger in my opinion, but I might have been spoiled.
3. The "submit comment" is the only unstyled element in the comment form - looks a little out of place. I would also change the title to "Leave a comment" instead of "Leave a reply".

Again, great job!
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Weirdan
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Re: critique my blog

Post by Weirdan »

pytrin wrote: 3. The "submit comment" is the only unstyled element in the comment form - looks a little out of place. I would also change the title to "Leave a comment" instead of "Leave a reply".
+1 for submit button. The input fields a bit too bright to my taste, I think they looks out of place too and could use some darkening :lol: .
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Luke
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Re: critique my blog

Post by Luke »

pytrin wrote:Hey man, it looks great! clean layout, I like the color palette, navigation integrates very nicely - good job!

I have really small comments -
1. I would like to see the time the post was published, in addition to the date. It is sometimes useful to see when the comments appeared in relation to the time it was posted.
2. The font sizes could be a tad larger in my opinion, but I might have been spoiled.
3. The "submit comment" is the only unstyled element in the comment form - looks a little out of place. I would also change the title to "Leave a comment" instead of "Leave a reply".

Again, great job!
Thanks a lot! :) I added the time on the post detail page (in the footer). I played around with larger fonts, but I like them how they are. You can always press ctrl + to get bigger font.

As far as the forms go, you're right. That's the next thing I'll do... I need to come up with a sexy form scheme...
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Luke
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Re: critique my blog

Post by Luke »

Is it easy enough to tell what are links? That's one thing I'm not sure about.
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Weirdan
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Re: critique my blog

Post by Weirdan »

Luke wrote:Is it easy enough to tell what are links? That's one thing I'm not sure about.
Easy for me - they are underlined.
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Eran
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Re: critique my blog

Post by Eran »

Regular links are good - underlined and different color. I would also add some indication that the headers are links (maybe :hover adds an underline?)
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kaszu
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Re: critique my blog

Post by kaszu »

Text color I think should have more contrast (hard to keep focus). I agree about font size, it should be larger.
More whitespace between posts.
I think post headlines should have underline.
Subheadings I don't think should have underlines (bottom border), because it looks like ending of the post (look better without border).
Most users has resolution 1024x768 or more, so width could be increased (on my 1920 looks unusually small).

When first visited your website, first think what I saw was "14 February, 2009". It's only additional information, so it should be more "invisible".

Font size and text color contrast!!!
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Benjamin
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Re: critique my blog

Post by Benjamin »

kaszu wrote:Text color I think should have more contrast (hard to keep focus).
I agree. You can get a good feel for the contrast by converting a screenshot to greyscale. Other than that, it looks great. Great job on the colors. How did you create the color scheme?
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Luke
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Re: critique my blog

Post by Luke »

well brown and blue are my favorite colors. I found those two colors pretty easily by dinking around with the color picker and then the rest are mostly just variations on those two colors.
the lame article on my site wrote:I chose brown and blue because somebody recently pointed out to me that I rarely wear anything that isn’t brown, blue or a combination there-of, so when it came time to design my site, the color scheme was an obvious choice.
I agree about the contrast now that you guys mention it. Thanks... I'll play around with that (and thanks for that tip astions). I may eventualy widen the layout, but right now I just don't have the energy haha. I'm not sure why I went with such a small layout :crazy:

This is all great stuff, thanks so much guys. :)
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Luke
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Re: critique my blog

Post by Luke »

I just wanted to point this out because it's awesome. If you go to my site in ie6, you get this nice little notice on the top of the page...
Attachments
iesux.jpg
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jayshields
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Re: critique my blog

Post by jayshields »

Sweet. Every website should have something like that.
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papa
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Re: critique my blog

Post by papa »

Haha awesome :)
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Benjamin
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Re: critique my blog

Post by Benjamin »

That's cool. What would really be good is if we could block IE at the router level. All versions.
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pickle
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Re: critique my blog

Post by pickle »

  • When there are no comments, "None" seems to fill up too much space in the balloon. I'd use a zero instead.
  • It's also (relatively) hard to click a link that's just 1 character. Expand the link to encompass the whole balloon, so as soon as I mouseover the balloon, the link becomes active.
  • Make the edge of the content background image more distinct. As it is, it kind of looks like the darker background is just seeping into the lighter brown, rather than having a distinct drop shadow. Maybe making the content background image darker would make it pop.
  • Make the blog title the header for an entry, not the date it was posted. It makes it much easier to scan because:
    1. The blog title is a different colour & therefore easier to jump from one to the other
    2. It will be unique
  • Don't underline your links, give them a bottom border. An underline cuts through the descenders in letters like y, or q, whereas a bottom border will appear below those.
  • Possibly related to my point above about how the main content background doesn't have a distinct edge, but the footer seems out of place. It just seems to suddenly have a darker background. Not sure how to fix that.
  • The copyright symbol is shorthand for "copyright". Saying "copyright ©2009" is redundant.
  • While the columns in the footer might technically be evenly spaced, they don't look it because the first column has so much text. I'd bump the last two columns over 10 or 20 pixels.
  • It's a neat font in the header, but I personally stick with just using a plain font - simply because it's faster (to download, and to change)
  • "Contact" isn't centered in it's link.
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