South Pole Travelogue looking for criticism

Your not referncing your elements correctly so To fix your CSS problem change….
#lh-col #rh-col, ul
{ color: #CCC;
font-weight: bold; margin-left: 5px;
padding: 3px 0; }

#lh-col #rh-col, ul li { background-color: #D3D3D3;
border-bottom: 3px solid #B0B0B0;
border-left: 3px solid #B0B0B0; border-right: 3px solid #B0B0B0;
border-top: 3px solid #B0B0B0; color: #404040;
font: 12px "Trebuchet MS", "Times New Roman", serif;
letter-spacing: 1px;
margin-top: 5px;
padding: 4px 0 0 5px;
}

#lh-col #rh-col, ul ul { background-color: #E0E0E0;
border-top: 1px solid #B0B0B0;
font-size: 14px; line-height: 100%;
margin-left: -5px; padding: 6px 0;
}
#lh-col #rh-col, ul ul li { background-color: #E0E0E0;
border: 0;
font: normal normal 70%/115% 'Lucida Sans Unicode', Verdana, sans-serif;
letter-spacing: 0;
margin: 0;
padding: 0;}

with…….
#lh-col ul, #rh-col ul
{ color: #CCC;
font-weight: bold; margin-left: 5px;
padding: 3px 0; }

#lh-col ul li, #rh-col ul li { background-color: #D3D3D3;
border-bottom: 3px solid #B0B0B0;
border-left: 3px solid #B0B0B0; border-right: 3px solid #B0B0B0;
border-top: 3px solid #B0B0B0; color: #404040;
font: 12px "Trebuchet MS", "Times New Roman", serif;
letter-spacing: 1px;
margin-top: 5px;
padding: 4px 0 0 5px;
}

#lh-col ul ul, #rh-col ul ul { background-color: #E0E0E0;
border-top: 1px solid #B0B0B0;
font-size: 14px; line-height: 100%;
margin-left: -5px; padding: 6px 0;
}
#lh-col ul ul li, #rh-col ul ul li { background-color: #E0E0E0;
border: 0;
font: normal normal 70%/115% 'Lucida Sans Unicode', Verdana, sans-serif;
letter-spacing: 0;
margin: 0;
padding: 0;}

Apart from that the design is okay, i’m not a huge fan of such a bright blue and I think the photo montage header and text let down the site – but its a fairly standard blog where the images and text is more important.
I’ve also noticed that your right hand column overlaps the center by 1px.
If you want a hand with the design/header I’m a bit bored so feel free to drop me an email
McC

@mcc
“its a fairly standard blog where the images and text is more important.”
I thought a blog was there to communicate, so surely images and text are *always* more important ?
Surely we aren’t at a point where if it doesn’t look ‘funky’ or ‘cool’ we then ignore the content ??

Thats not quite what I was trying to say Podz – content is always king (to use the cheesy overused phrase). By my poorly phrased comment, I didn’t mean that design should be more important – just that the design used here is a fairly standard one (not bad/not brilliant) but thats its nothing to worry about because the images and text are more important. (hope that clears things up a bit ?? )
The following is NOT meant to be further criticism…but if it comes to how I would do this site design wise if it was mine then I’d probably go for something a bit like (a five minute photoshop mockup)….
https://chris.lineages.co.uk/mockup1.jpg
Taking one of theglobalguy’s excellent photo’s as a header graphic – with site name in simple white text losing the embossed effect of the old header and using simple grey bars to give separation with the main body.
Then using the header graphic colours I’ve selected a couple as the basis of the other colours in the scheme – eg the vibrant blue background, the dark blue header colours.
In my mockup I’ve also decided to lose the world map background – which takes quite a long time to load over my wee dialup – to leave a simple white background for the text which is a dark grey rather than black which can sometimes be a bit too harsh
And obviously I’ve included the ubiquitous drop shadow ??
One problem with the two column version is that henry is quite a prolific writer and has archives going back years – which could lead to the column being too long – in that case I would go for a selective cull of the contents of the side panels eg pull together the lonely planet and meta data would give you less – losing the weather could be an option – or changing the archives into annual rather than monthly sections (???)

I see what you mean ??
I’m not one to critique other’s blogs – I am appalling at design and can never settle on anything for more than a few weeks, but having looked at the site, and your jpg, I can see one thing which I think would be good there.
Drop-down Archives.
That would free up lots of screen real estate, would be even better if it could be done by year, and then either a #menu is freed up for other content or the #content div can be widened to help display the longer entries / images.
Please can we have Drop-down Archives ?
And globalguy ? I am sooooo jealous of those temperatures!!

Thats actually a really good idea Podz – space saving yet functional ?? – but is there an easy way to set up archives as a drop down list in WP?
As for the temperature it does make scotland seem toastie warm….

d-d a’s ?
Not seen it yet ………

This has been a really interesting demo by arthur01 so thanks. My take is that there is a really solid link between “design” in all its meaning and the useability readability and accessibility of the content. My 2 cents.

Root – thanks, I wasn’t sure how it would go down to be honest
Podz – I’ve just come across …
https://www.ads-software.com/support/3/5661
which discusses doing a drop down archive list. – could be very handy here. It does use an onchange event to change the page which I’ve never been sure about the accesibility of .

arthuc01 – many thanks ! I’d missed that!!

Nae probs hen

Wow, thanks for all the assistance and suggestions! I didn’t expect quite so much feedback. I’ll start making a few modifications as soon as I’ve got a decent internet connection…we’ve got about 6 hours a day of broadband access, 6 hours of dial-up like connections, and 12 hours a day of no access at all.
The first things I’ll fix will be the CSS and the one pixel offset error. I like the suggestion of the drop down monthly archives. That’ll save huge amounts of space. The weather has to stay, just because the question I get most frequently from friends and family is “How cold is it there today?”.
Arthurc01, I really like the mockup you’ve done, especially the color scheme. I need to put some thought into deciding if I want to go with just a polar theme, or focus on all of my travels. I hadn’t even considered the effect of the background graphic, but since a good majority of my family is still on dial-up, that’s an excellent point.
What is the general feeling of the design benefits of a 3 col vs a 2 col design? I like the look of the 3 column layout, but I’m a bit concerned that it’s taking up too much screen estate on smaller monitors. Thoughts?

theglobalguy – glad you like the mock up (i wasn’t sure if I was over stepping netiquette) – As I said I chose the colour scheme based on one of your photo’s but what you could do is via the magical power of css have a different header&background for each category (using the body id) so you can have an antartica theme along with a USA theme along with an african theme etc… each based on some of your favorite photo’s- but maintaining a consistant page structure throughout (just a thought). eg…
https://diveintomark.org/archives/2003/01/16/body_ids
As for the whole two/three column thing it depends on personal preference really – I’ve always prefered two columns but its often necessary to use the third if you have content that demands to be there – the best thing to do is to think about your audience – mostly friends and family from your comments so what would they like? are they perhaps elderly and would prefer a larger font size which would demand more screen real estate?

I love the theme per category idea. If you don’t mind, I’ll steal the basic design that you came up for one of them, and then start working on some others. Now I just need to figure out a color scheme for the basic everything main page.
The CSS fixes you provided did the trick…I didn’t realize I’d missed something so fundamental to the CSS syntax. That was driving me nuts trying to fix it!
In the interest of reducing vertical scrolling (something I really hate on a blog…I think it looks weird when the center section continues, but the side bar has no content…just a personal thing) I’ve cut the number of posts per page down to two. When I’m actually talking about something, not just test posting the posts are usually pretty long, so that should keep the center column full.
Finally…I implemented the archive drop down idea, and I really like that. I moved a few of the other boxes around to balance the two edge columns out, and I’m sure that’ll change more as I add other things like a random photo box, or whatever else strikes me at the moment.
Thanks again!

“If you don’t mind, I’ll steal the basic design that you came up for one of them, and then start working on some others.” – help yourself mate thats what its there for
“The CSS fixes you provided did the trick…I didn’t realize I’d missed something so fundamental to the CSS syntax. That was driving me nuts trying to fix it!” – easy enough done
That drop down archive works really well, which is great – I’ll have to rememember that for the future I’m sure it’ll come in handy .