elginism.com

Very nice look and very clean, too. I’ve never been too fond of the border of the content crossing over the sidebar. I keep wanting to pick the sidebar blocks up and put them on top, so they look like they are “floating” over the top of the content border. But that’s just me.

The quote at the top is very nice, and appropriate with the theme, though it would be nicer if the quotes could feature some style that resembed the mosaic graphic next to the post’s meta data section. I like that graphic. A very nice touch.

The blockquotes within the text with the gradient background are well done and fit in well with the site’s overall look.

The look is consistent throughout the entire site and it’s pleasing and matches the site’s content. Well done. Great work.

Thanks for the input.

The quotes actually change each time you visit the site, but are all similar length & equally relevant so that they don’t alter the layout to much.

Can you explain exactly what you mean about the style on the quotes matching the meta section, as I’m not entirely clear what you mean by this.

I agree the gradients are beautiful. Neat how the whole posts-section has a gentle gradient from right to left, and then the blockquotes have a deeper stronger gradient from left to right. Did that idea come from the original theme?

FWIW, I like the overlapped menus. I think it looks cool, modern and transparent.

I think the other commenter was urging you to make more use of the tiny latice/brick icon. I also would like to see that icon echoed or repeated somewhere else in the design, perhaps in a subtle way since it could be an imposing pattern if overused. My thought was to see an entire row of them, if they connect smoothly, along the bottom border, but that might be tasteless I don’t know. As much as I like this little icon, I don’t like it under the quote at the top because there is empty space between the icon and the quote-attribution.

I gathered the definintion of “Elginism” but it would be cool if you could show the pronunciation.

You don’t display categories? I heard some people don’t like them but to me are one of the neatest things about WP blogs.

Thanks for the suggestions.

The gradients were there in the original theme, but I made some of them, particularly the one behind quotes, a lot stronger, as there are a lot of quotes from articles on the site & I felt it was important for them to stand out from the parts that I had written myself.

In terms of the pronounciation, have a look at the site now & tell me if this is what you were meaning. I’m not sure what will happen to this though if some machines don’t have these extended characters in their fonts – possibly it would be better for me to make it part of the bitmap instead.

I’ll have a think about the pattern & other ways I might incorporate it. It was based of part of the original painted decoration of the Parthenon ( A redone version is here, that is a lot clearer.)

I took the categories off (I can’t remember the exact reason why now) but I can see that they do make it easier to use. Thinking back now, I wanted to get them into the same block as search & archive, but kept ended up with a band of white between the two sections within that box, so left them out until I had worked out how to fix the CSS so that this didn’t happen.

The pronunciation thing looks great on my Firefox browser, you might want to bitmap it per the reason you stated. That is what I was thinking. Those images of the decoration are very neat, and affirm how I like that architechtural pattern as an icon/element on your theme. I agree categories would belong near your archives and search; they could be a dropdown menu, but you’ve got plenty of room to keep extending the sidebar down.

I’ve made the pronounciation into a image now, as I am certain that if the font gets substituted, some fonts will not have the schwa (upside down e) character for instance. I’ve also set it to link to a more complete definition of the word, which can serve as an introduction to the site (also accessed from the “what is elginism” link on the sidebar) until I have the time to write out a more complete introduction page for the site.
I’ll still have to spend a bit of time thinking about other ways that I might try & incorporate the decorative elements in the layout.