Review my site design: BE BRUTAL!!!

Looks fine to me. I would remove the wife’s website link at the bottom, in order to make the green bar flush with the bottom of the page. Put that website link elsewhere, or just extend the green bar down to cover it as well.

you said brutal, right? well these are my personal things…

a lot has happened since 2005 = 86 the “www” = not needed anymore. if you notice how nice one of your headlines look. designer means simplify

don’t show underline on links. ok for rollover. color callout seems enough. simplify

avoid email links = your contact link = spam target. here is a nice plug that is much safer and gives a nice professional look and pretty easy to tweak to fit your style and taste = https://green-beast.com/blog/?page_id=136

agree with wife comment

thanks, that’s what I’m talking about!!

I’m losing the ‘www’ that’s a no-brainer

I’m curious why the ‘footer’ is getting flagged. I feel like the content area gets constrictive when the white area (with my wife’s link) is removed. Would it be helpful to put a little bit more content there so it isn’t so empty?

Gmail does a rad job of killing spam so I’m not really concerned about posting my actual address, though if at some point I switch to a domainname address I’ll definitely want to use a submission form.

I’m pretty focused on accessibility so, though I’ll concede that underlined links are less pleasant, for the time being they’ll be sticking around (at least as long as the link color is green (hard for colorblind users)

I really do appreciate the feedback, please keep it coming.
I’d especially like some thoughts on:
The placement of ‘scott/lenger’ is it too low?
Does the picture seemed balanced?
Is the black left hand column too dark and heavy?
What initial feelings to you get (warm, cold, light, serious, funny, engaging, academic, edgy)

Regarding the footer:

You can insert some dead vertical space if you like there, I just think that the site would look better if the green was actually the footer and actually touched the bottom of the page. The extra black/white bar at the bottom is somewhat distracting to me.

But I also disagree with the avoid email links suggestion above. I have had my email on my website and on dozens of others. I post it freely. It has neither increased nor decreased spam, you get spam either way. Rely on filters to eliminate spam. Gmail does a heck of a job.

BTW, when you switch to a domain address, sign up for Google Apps for your domain. It rocks. I use it and my ottodestruct.com email account has the gmail interface. ??

i am stuck today and maybe in a contrary mood while waiting for things to sort out. let’s use a favorite line in these situations = smart people are allowed to disagree ?? about the spam thing and as otto points out, there are very good spam filters. this is a site of a web designer who talks about code, validation, sight empaired. the criteria here is a bit different.

the pop-up email client window: there is little control over what an end user has as an email client. there are sleek/robust contact solutions that can better demonstrate web-savvy expertise. i wish this was the case for registration at this moment.

aesthetics on your own stuff: these things are personal and things always get better with continous refining. at a certain point either you decide the painting is done or your life partner does.

I’m a stickler for these things — on the left side of your blog, it says “Everything in it’s right place”. It should be “Everything in its right place”. Drop the apostrophe.

The blog looks pretty cool. I like the colours, but I think the Recent Comments section has too much prominence for my liking.

that halfbloodprince. I think you might be right about the recent comments…

I really like it. Granted, I’m coming in a little late, but what you’ve got now definitely catches my fancy. The pic in the header gives a link to its Flickr location; does it change randomly/daily/when-new-ones-arrive? Or is it a permanent fixture?

I am not sure about using xhtml strict. I am interested in your thinking on that.

Hey Root, seems like you’re referring to your post The end of XHTML?

I use XHTML because it helps promote good coding practices

From WASP:
XHTML is easier to maintain

XML syntax rules are far more rigorous than HTML. As a result, XHTML makes authors work more precisely, having to address issues such as:

• all elements and attribute names must appear in lower case
• all attribute values must be quoted
• non-Empty Elements require a closing tag
• empty elements are terminated using a space and a trailing slash
• no attribute minimization is allowed
• in strict XHTML, all inline elements must be contained in a block element

Also: down the road I want to begin working with API’s (like flickr), and it seems that XHTML (being based off xml) is better suited for that.

I’m glad I checked your post as it helped make me aware of the significance of media types

I also found this post (The Invisible Design Decision) extremely helpful in sorting out which media type to use with XHTML.

re: jonlandrum

The homepage images does not rotate (though I’ve thought about it…and it may in the future)

It does change based on what section of the site you’re in via a php script that assigns a css file based on page or category id. If you click the links in the header nav you’ll see what I mean.

Surely by using strict it only needs one error and it wont render at all?

Root: No, strict just means that the syntax is a little more picky. It’s even pickier if you move up to 1.1 instead of 1.0.

I was using 1.1 for a while, but eventually it got to be too annoying to have to find workarounds to make everything valid all the time, so I switched back to 1.0 transitional.

I like it…

Had to dig for the Next and previous links within the blog though but what you did with them makes sense.

@ otto42: I am not going to get into this here. ??