Feedback on photoblog

Great blog, Great photos! I love the look! If I struggled to give you a suggestion it would be to try to get the photo’s a bit higher on the page. You’d have to eliminate some stuff on the top of the page so it’d probably open a can of worms, but it still looks great.
I also like that you put the camera settings in the photos.

1. I really like that header is without <img> at all, just font.
But why do you use title?
<a href="https://www.plastanka.se/" title="p l a s t a n k a . s e" rel="home">p l a s t a n k a . s e</a>

2. Information appearing when mouse is over — that’s great! But if you can visually separate camera info, date and text — do it.

3. #444 instead of #000 makes your text look much softer. I like it.

4. There’s a line in your style.css i’d rather remove.

/* =header */
#access #menu a{font-weight:800;}

The reason is you don’t use bold in you blog that much, so your menu looks a little bit strange.

5. I didn’t like that shadow:
.page h2.entry-title {-moz-opacity:0.95;filter:alpha opacity=95);opacity:0.95;}

6. You can customize your comment form. Just add to your style.css something like:

#author, #email, #url, #comment, #submit {
   padding: 3px;
   margin: 0 5px 0 0;
   color: #444;
}

It will add some space and replace your black font with grey one.

Content: I like you photos. My mom is a great flower fan, so i think that your blog will be one of her favourite .)

Great inputs!

Have two questions though, first regading the menu on the top. Have ideas of either making it horizontal above the images or divide it up in two columns where the left column would be right-aligned. But I’m not sure how to do this, tried to do changes in css, but ith no luck.

The second question I got the answer before writing ??

I will try to separate the camera info from the text, but not sure how to do this as it is only normal text both of them as now. Have not been able to get the EXIF automtically yet.

I guess you make your menu with <?php get_pages(); ?>, right?

01. If you want to make the menu horizontal.
Your style.css should look this way:

/* =header */
#header {margin: 50px 0;text-transform: none;width: 800px;clear: none;display: block;float: left;}
#header a:hover {text-decoration:none;color:#888;}
#header h1 a {font-size:1.8em;font-weight:100;letter-spacing:-0.05em;position:relative;}
#header #blog-description {color:#888;}
#access {vertical-align:middle;padding: 0 0 10px 0;}
#access #menu {vertical-align:middle;display:table-cell;font-size:0.8em;}
#access #menu ul {vertical-align:middle;display:block}
#access #menu ul li {float: left;}
#access #menu ul li a{margin-left:10px;font-weight: bold;display: block;	padding: 0 10px;}
#access #menu a{font-weight:600;}

Play a little with padding/margin to make it work fine with your graphic content.

2. If you want to divide your menu into 2 parts.
This will be more interesting, because you’ll have to edit header.php, too.
The point is you have 7 links in the menu. How are you going to make it symmetrical? But let’s imagine you don’t have a rss link.
Now we’ll make your header.php more static. Unfortunately, i don’t see your file, that’s why i can only suppose that it looks like this:

<div id="access">
   <div id="menu">
      <ul><?php get_pages(); ?></ul>
   </div>
</div>

If i’m right, please, replace these lines with:

<div id="access"><div id="menu">
   <ul class="menu-left">
      <li><a href="<?php bloginfo('url'); ?>" title="p l a s t a n k a . s e" rel="home">home</a></li>
      <li><a href="<?php bloginfo('url'); ?>/see-something/" title="See something">see something</a></li>
      <li><a href="<?php bloginfo('url'); ?>/project-chili/" title="Project chili">project chili</a></li>
   </ul>
   <ul class="menu-right">
      <li><a href="<?php bloginfo('url'); ?>/archives/" title="Find something">find something</a></li>
      <li><a href="<?php bloginfo('url'); ?>/about/" title="About everything">about everything</a></li>
      <li><a href="<?php bloginfo('url'); ?>/send-a-message/" title="Send a message">send a message</a></li>
   </ul>
</div></div>

Bad news: Now you always have to keep your navigation in mind. Since you begin doing something manually, there is no wordpress to update pages instead of you any more. Remember it.
Before, you could just add a new page and it would automatically appear in your header. Now, you have to add it to the navigation bar by adding a new <li>Page</li> to header.php.
Great news: You are absolutely free to arrange pages in any order, give them any titles and link them to any pages you want. Now you are the master. And your menu has nothing left to do but obbey .)

Style.css should look this way:

/* =header */
#header {margin:50px 0;text-transform:none;width:200px;clear:none;float:left;}
#header a:hover {text-decoration:none;color:#888;}
#header h1 a {font-size:1.8em;font-weight:100;letter-spacing:-0.05em;position:relative;}
#header #blog-description {color:#888;}
#access {height:160px;vertical-align:middle;width:350px;float: right;margin: 60px 0 0;}
#access #menu {vertical-align:middle;font-size:0.8em;}
#access #menu ul {vertical-align:middle;display:block;width: 160px;}
#access #menu ul.menu-left {float: left;text-align: right;padding: 0 10px 0 0;}
#access #menu ul.menu-right {float: right;padding: 0 0 0 10px;}
#access #menu a {font-weight:600;}

Again, play with padding/margin untill you like it.
Note: i made all the titles lower case in order to bring more symmetry.

I hope this will help you.
If you want me to explain anything — feel free to ask.
If you will suddenly realize that now you want something completely different — feel free to ask .)

Good luck ,)

Hi Plastanka,

It looks nice in firefox but not so in IE7.
Try it out in https://browsershots.org/
Choice of all sorts of browsers. IE is important because a lot of your visitors probably use it.

pioneerka: will look into that with menus when I get time, but good ideas there.

henkholland: You are right about that, its not my theme from the beginning, but in IE 8 it seems to be ok.

I have some ideas to change towards a more standard blog type but still for photos, but I’m not sure. It depends if I find a theme that I can edit.

Another idea is to editing more of this one that I use and maybe add some more color to it. I’m not sure what to do ??

pioneerka: I’m looking in to maybe get a background for the header like link has, but also for footer. Then one could get a background for everything outside. Also an idea is to have icons as menu in the header.

How about this, hard to implement?

Solved most of the issues now but can anyone help me to find out why I get this big space before the footer in (Archives) for example, while on home and single post (single post) there is not this problem.

why I get this big space before the footer

it’s your tag cloud, i guess.

I’m looking in to maybe get a background for the header

Umm.. to say the truth, i didn’t understand you .)
In order to add a background picture to the header/footer, just add something like this to your style.css :

#header {background: url('path_to_the_image');} /* adds a pic to the whole header /*
#header h1 {background: url('path_to_the_image');} /* adds a logo */
# footer {background: url('path_to_the_image');} /*adds a pic to the footer */

If you can explain me your idea in other words, maybe i can help you .)
Oh.. and i do wanna help you .)

and that tag cloud is awesome .)
i want it for my blog, too. yet need to decide where to put it.

the big space there is not because the cloud because you also find it on https://www.plastanka.se/see-something/ for example and it was there before the cloud.

I think I skip the “idea” with image header and menu, right now it looks quite good since the solution to divide it into two columns. Just need somewhere to put rss, maybe in the footer.

look here.
that’s what i see in safari. is it supposed to be so?

I see the full text in safari, maybe it is something with the amount of windows?

Do you have an idea about the space?

RSS:
I use 3 browsers = Opera + Firefox + Safari. Each of them displays your rss feed right in the address bar. Do you really need to put the icon somewhere else? If so, yes, footer is a good idea.