I'll just give you a few of my thoughts. Take 'em or leave 'em. I know you're a capable designer and you're confident about your work, but here's my take on the design aspect and a touch of
SEO.
First, the
SEO:
Your header should be more like this:
- Code: Select all
<div id="header">
<h1>Web Nonsense on Family, Web, jeepin', music and photography</h1>
<p class="logo"><a href="/">karinne.net</a></p>
</div>
- Leave the links out of <h1>'s. Leave them out of <h2>'s if possible.
- /archive/?bid=10 is a bad link. Use /archive/then-there-was-style/
- <div class="date">March 20, 2007</div> should use <p>, not <div>
- All in all, using PHP query strings for pages on your site is a bad idea. There are many ways you can avoid this.
As for the design, here are a few things that bugged me:
- First, I dislike the arrows in the navigation. Your entire site consists of thick lines and heavy text. The thinness of those lines just doesn't fit in.
- The colors. I think you're very close, but on the right side bar, that darker brown just doesn't look right to me. I think you'd be better off making the background the same color as the nav list's background.
- Make those little icons transparent GIF's. The comment bubble and the calendar backgrounds are both slightly off on my computer.
- Why are you using an image in the footer?
- Move that statcounter code to the bottom, it's been significantly slowing down the page, and I had to wait 30 seconds a couple times before anything after the script would show up.
- If that "And now with style!" badge were a bright orange or red or purple, I think it would enhance the design a bit more. Saying something is stylish in a boring, neutral color seems a bit odd to me.
- I personally don't like the hover state on your logo. Add that shadow just looks odd. If you made the shadow less black and enlarged the font on the hover, I think it would look better. It would look as though it would be popping off the page, rather than just magically getting a shadow.
- Where are the accesskeys at?
My view...
Design: 4 out of 5
Code: 4 out of 5
Accessibility: 4 out of 5
Functionality: 5 out of 5
SEO: 2.5 out of 5