web non-sense

So here it is ... finally!

My blog has style

The titles (h2, h3, h4) use sIFR method and I absolutely love it! It turned out very well.

I still haven't fixed the archive section .... it will eventually be just a list of the titles or month/year list. Right now, I've just laid out every posts. And I want to use .htaccess mod_rewrite as well but haven't gotten around to knowing how to do that yet

There's also a bit of styling with the comments and the comment form that need to be done too ...

I'd like your opinions on the general layout, the little coding sections in the articles and whatever else you think looks off ... or cool

Yeah looks nice (and how many backlinks from Yahoo!?!?!?) - only problem I have is that it messes up a little bit on the right when at 800x600 (not content wise, just the header image is too wide.

Otherwise I like it

It's lovely, I especially love your use of sIFR. Just a shame about the loss of the right clcik (I tend to open links in new tabs in flock and I can't with flash). Love the font though, what is it? Great design, easy to read and navigate. Thumbs up from me, nice one.

Pete.

Hi Karinne!
Love it! It's a very solid design! Easy to navigate, Sexy enough to be interesting...
I see you have a spam issue though... darn.. it's always something huh?

GREAT site!

Yeah ... I went for a 900px design ... I don't have too many 800px viewers so I'm giving it a shot. Since, like you noticed, it's mostly the banner that's 900px wide.

Thanks!

Read my latest blog .. it's in there Thanks!

Yeah ... darned spammers! I have a nice little code but it doesn't seem to be working properly. I have to look at it a figure out what's going on there. I don't have too many so far so ...

Thanks!

Having just launched a blog site myself, I found this most interesting. To be perfectly honest I couldn't really bothered to build my own form the bottom up so I used WordPress and tried to find the most customizable theme I could.

Your site though is very very nice indeed. When I run it thorugh the validator though, it seems to have a problem with your H1 tag for some reason. *scratches head* might want to address that in case it affects any SEO.

But over all, just as I expected, the site is beautiful and very well coded. Seeing as I have been following your work for a couple of years now (from before I left webdesignforums.net under a cloud :S) I didn't expect anything less from you.

Well done!

I fixed the "Latest Comments" column in the footer. It now aligns with the sidebar background

Yeah ... I forgot to fix that last night. It's because I have my <h1> in an <a ...> tag I was just testing stuff out and I didn't put the <a ..> tag in the right spot.

Thanks Dan! Really appreciate it!

No probs

Great work, Karinne. But then that's what we have come to expect from you. So one little opps just means anyone can mess up. lol

Thanks Sannbe ... and everyone else that replied. I really appreciate all the comments!

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

I'm working on that via .htaccess ... just haven't had time to implement/play with it yet.

hmmm ... I don't see a date as a paragraph ... semantically I don't think that works.

I'll agree with you there ... I'm looking at making them thicker actually.

I tried that and they didn't look very good ... I'm going to have to make them in PNG's and hack the hell out of them for IE6's sake

errrr ... because of the outer glow on that line at the bottom

Yeah ... I'm contemplating getting Mint for this site too

One more thing I need to do

Thanks Ryan!

I would probably agree that the date belongs in a paragraph. Semantically, in my eyes at least, it should be part of the main content and would make more sense with <p> tags. We could argue this one forever though. Especially since a date in my eyes is part of a heading, but semantically that doesn't work for me.

It's your call though, it's still accessible.

Pete.

Fair enough.

I see where you're coming from, but you have to make the choice and think, "Is it closer to a division or a paragraph?" Personally, I consider it more of a paragraph, but it is up to you.

It's part of the design. Make it a background to a <div>. Utilizing the <img> tag for the site's design is bad


Great site, and I can't wait to see it finished!

Oh yeah ... sorry ... I forgot to put that as a background when testing the whole thing me so slow ... it's monday

Haha, no worries.

Code: Select all

karinne {
    awesome: 100%;
}

^ Look how clever I am!!!!!!!!

awesome!

It looks like wordpress, its clean, and to the point, however i discussed this with Minute44, and although he loves the colour scheme, i cant help but think perhaps it looks like dated.. you could do something about more, i dno, stylish? This is purely as its not to my taste, theres alot of ppl like and a few dislike, no ones ever gonna agree.

Last time i checked the code it looked clean so i wont bother recheckin

Overall good job

Thanks Ghorthaur. About the colors ... I've always been a dark-color-fan for my blog ... not sure why but ... this color scheme is new for me. So ... I'm kind of testing it out to see how long I can stand it but ... so far I really like.

I guess, lie you said, this is a matter of personal opinions

Thanks again for your input!