Would appreciate any comments/thoughts

I would say you are moving down a good path.

I would watch that red bar at the top. It’s a little, uh, stark compared to the rest of the pales on the page. Something that demanding of attention should probably not be a decorative divider.

Finally, both sidebars are quite sparse on the right side padding.

Good work, keep it up.

I like it. I say the simpler the better.

On https://www.tiengmag.com/movabletype/blogs/food/
I like it but I change the cyan blue headlines they vibrate on the screen and are quite light on the PC which means they are very light on a Mac. Id you the headline color from your socialpatterns.com site as the color on your food related site.

Other than that nice and clean very easy to read.

chuyskywalker: what do you mean sparse on the right padding? (should I add more padding from the right side? there’s a huge chunk of whitespace on my screen to the right)

thanks for the comments – out of the two, which one would you all say is a better layout?

Out of the 2 I’d pick https://www.socialpatterns.com/ it looks more organized and more professional. The navigation is much nicer too. I’d make your post text one or two pixels bigger. Smaller text than tiengmag.com but larger than it is currently.

If you add google ads to it I’d put them at the bottom of the right nav.

Of the two, https://www.socialpatterns.com/ looks best, but it also looks like it gets a little more love. Nice open inviting designs.

I’ve run into a small css issue – for some reason on IE (https://www.socialpatterns.com/) whenever I hover over header links…the text shifts place.

Anyone see this or know why this is happening?

I’m going out on a limb here and guess that, “IE blows green chunks?”

@ dyn4mik3 : Can’t reproduce same error in my IE (6.0 on WinXP SP2)

Others have mentioned it too. I find that red bar at the top to be a bit visually jarring. Maybe if it was a bit vertically narrower it wouldn’t be so disturbing. It draws my eye away from the stuff you want me to read, which I’m sure isn’t your intent.

I testdrove in IE6 on win2k and couldn’t reproduce the error other people experienced. I will mention though that IE has issues with line height as well as certain fonts. These issues could be triggered by certain resolutions or screen sizes. Just a thought.