Archived Review
- Reviewer: meggan
- Review date: 11th Nov 2009
Yow. Your site layout is definitely bold, that's for sure. It's super purple and super contrast-y, which makes it difficult to look at for any length of time.
The background is pretty busy - I'd recommend bringing the image into Photoshop (or whatever you use as your image editor), adding a layer of opaque white on top, and then adjusting the opacity of that layer to tone down the contrast. Even a 20% fill would probably help make the background feel less crazy, especially since it's such a cute image and I want to be able to see it without having it be shoved in my face. You want people to be able to focus on your content, but your background is so loud it's kind of hogging all the attention. It is screaming at me! Eeek!
Speaking of screaming, your post titles! OMG! They yell at me! I love the super-bold look you're going for, but I think the font size could afford to be quite a bit smaller and you'd still get that same effect. Perhaps try 16px or 20px tall instead of 40px? You could probably even afford to lighten the text up a bit too, but I think once it's smaller you wouldn't have to and it would help with the screaming problem.
You are doing great with using vertical padding for the most part, but where is your left-right padding? I'd pad the text in from the sides about twice as much as you are now, so going from 10px to maybe 20 or 25px on your content div.
The navigation looks kind of funky to me. I can't quite tell what you were trying to do here, as that very dark bar doesn't seem to match and once I hover over something, I can't see what I'm about to click on. Annoying! I also don't like that you got rid of the vowels in the words. I know it's the cool thing to do but it just kind of looks dumb and makes people think and decipher things before they know what to click on.
What are the ampersands for on your page titles? It looks like a mistake, not a style thing, so I'd recommend removing it. If you wanted to do something fancy with them, perhaps use one of the robots from your background image as the background for your page titles, and give them some left side padding? That seems like it would look cute.
Also, what in the WORLD is going on with your link styles? It is like trying to read a series of cardboard boxes instead of letters. Perhaps it looks better on your computer, but it's absolutely dreadful on mine. I would recommend using the normal font on your sute (like in the blog section) but perhaps making the links dark purple and bold, and then changing the color to the lighter purple on hover. MUCH more readable. (I'd do this on the blog section too, so the links aren't the default boring blue color.)
Also, it's not immediately clear that you have comments showing up on some of your pages - I'd recommend putting in a "Comments" or "Feedback" header before the list of comments so it doesn't look quite so much like just more page content. It needs to be better separated. It's not right now and it's confusing.
Since you have smilies enabled on your site, I'd recommend finding a set that better matches your layout. The default yellow ones that ship with WordPress are pretty ugly. Aneesah's Text Emoticons are pretty popular; you could also look into finding robot-themed ones if you were so inclined.
Your tutorials are kind of weird and of poor quality - I would recommend making them subpages of your tutorial page, and then writing out the instructions as page content, using images to highlight different steps along the way. Merely linking to a .png image feels unfinished.
I am not impressed with the WordPress theme you are offering. I downloaded it to check it out and there are SO many things I could say about this theme alone. There's no discernible color scheme; the header image is so horrifying I can only hope you are joking; for some reason you bundled the files but left the images hosted elsewhere instead of sticking them in an image folder inside your theme folder; and I'm just plain not convinced that you know enough about design or how WordPress works to offer a downloadable theme that people will use. I have no idea why you are declaring the same background image in so many places, why you are using a non-web-safe font for your h1 tags, or why you left-align all of your code instead of tabbing/indenting to make it clearer and more legible. I realize you probably didn't expect to have this design critiqued as well, but if you are offering something up for download it should be of good quality and I can't say this is. I'd recommend removing it.
Also, why is there absolutely nothing about YOU on your site? People usually want to know something about who they are listening to. Perhaps I missed it? Either way, I have no idea who you are, what you like, or anything about you at all. Even if you are being anonymous online, you can still give some details about yourself to help your readers understand you and your perspective.
I think your site is reasonably new (or at least this incarnation of it is new-ish) so some of this can be attributed to trying to get the site out the door ASAP. That said, I think a lot more thought and purpose could go into your design and it would help the quality of your site immensely. You do have a very solid start and a bold style, both of which I like. There are just a lot of places that could use some touching up or refactoring to make them integrate into your site/layout better and make everything classier.