What are your thoughts on my portfolio/blog?

Looks good, but the code needs lots of work. Way too much code bloat. CSS styling should be in a separate file, thus in your style.css

Other than that, it looks really clean and sharp. Nice work.

Hi Chris.

It might be the dark theme but I didn’t ‘enjoy’ a casual glance over the page. My eyes didn’t know what to settle on first.

I find the grid style of the 9 posts lost any advantage in organisation as the post title color lacked contrast.

I’m a speed-reader and overall found my usual tricks of lazy-browsing were thwarted as I had no visual clues as to content importance, other than the logo offering up some nice differences in scale. (Sadly ruined by FB status updates. *cries*)

I don’t see any value in the tag presentation style which in effect robbed the design of vital whitespace, or in the case of this theme ‘blackspace’

You’re artist so put some art up centre-stage and point a bloody big spot-light at it. Don’t hide art away in a grid that looks like little news articles. I was thinking ‘where is his portfolio’?!

Don’t mean to be overly negative just saying it as I see it.

Have fun
Robbie

@WP4RE

All of my styling is in my style.css. Anything that isn’t is being created by Facebook or a plugin. Not much I can do about that.

@oag

1. Thanks for the honest comment. I recently brought down the contrast on my site. It just seemed a bit too intense before, but I guess different people prefer different levels of contrast.
2. I’ve been working wit the grid for some time now. Would you like less type, but larger font-size and line-height?
3. I am an artists, but the truth of the matter is, my blog generates all of my traffic. I can’t get people over to my site without it. My goal is to attract people via blog post so they check out my art and possible hire me to do some freelance work.
4. With that said, I designed the site not wanting to put the art front-and-center. It is second to the blog. I have been thinking about redesigning how each type of post is displayed (blog, art, work), so art and work get large images in the grid with little or no text. What do you think of that plan?
5. I am also going to do a slight redesign of the header, because I added those buttons at the top left to encourage people to explore posts. I added these (and a few other things) after my design was already completed. Things tend to make the design seem cluttered over time.

Anyways, I really appreciate you taking time out to talk about the site. Thanks!

Love the layout and your useful information!

2. Even a change to much more contrasting post title color would make things pop, but if you want to keep a restricted dark palette then something else like size, or maybe slightly different background color on the title text?

3 &4 – Don’t forget blog related traffic will come straight into the post itself rather than the homepage, so you can style your post sidebar, etc to offer exciting links to first-time visitors

I am similar to you in graphic/web designer but I decided to be a bit different and have graphic design site, a web design site, a creativity blog and a tumblr blog.
So I’ve gone too far into splitting everything up but as I blog more about art/design and creativity I’m not wanting to gain clients to web design via that channel.

I don’t particularly recommend my way. heh.

Cheers,
Robbie

I enjoyed the content on the site, was a bit disorienting at first visit however.

Once I figured out where things were and how to access content I wanted to view, was very informative. As previously stated, I think the landing page may be a bit too “busy”. Wasn’t until I started exploring all the links underneath the various topics I started finding things.

Looks like I need a slight redesign for that landing page. I’ll do some work and keep you posted.

Alright! Phase one of two is done. I have done a slight redesign above the navigation. What do you guys think of the new logo, social feed, and quick link navigation?

Next is the content on the homepage below the nav. I like how the secondary post pages look, so I think I just need to do something fresh with homepage entries.

https://geebart.com

I like the three links next to the logo, much better and more streamlined. The logo seems kind of out of place where it’s at in the context. One suggestion is to have the logo larger and put it to the left of geebArt, or even have it be part of the word so the logo and the word are one.

The social feeds work as long as there is enough action on it to make it so it is different each time someone visits.

Overall though, I like it the redesign so far.

I was really impressed with the design. Most WordPress sites look exactly the same after a while, but yours is a lot different. Perhaps all the black makes it a little uncomfortable to the eyes, but your site’s pretty cool. If you made your theme available I’m sure a lot of people would use it.

Good layout, lots of potential. Does not render well in Opera though. Try to implement some custom fonts through cufon to better highlight our your post headers. I’ll drop the text shadows if I were you.

What don’t you like about the text shadows? Besides the tag’s across the upper nav, I tried to make the shadows pretty subtle.

I have yet to design for IE or Opera, next on my list.

Also, what layout do you like better? The homepage, a page-page, or an interior post?

Very much appreciate all the comments everyone! ??

I meant the shadows under your text, especially headers. Shadows on black background don’t really pop out so much. I understand the need to differentiate the header, but maybe you could try a slightly bigger size or a different font altogether. Layout wise I think the homepage looks great. But it looks like you put more time in it than the subsequent post pages… The Illinois Uni search page is great!