Please give me feedback on my Design & Photography website!

I’m also a big fan of keeping the design of a site like that simple and somewhat bland to give the content the chance to stand out. I think you did great there ??

The Google ad block in on the single post pages, however, COMPLETELY distracted me from the text. Is it absolutely necessary to put it there? I also wish that the info on the About page were more straightforward. I did read it, but I’m still not exactly sure what’s going on or what the main purpose of the site is.

nice blog, simple and neat. I see that you have a lot of content on the blog, which is great ?? and the domain is cool too,

just a suggestion, when you use an image, try to resize the image before uploading. If a large image is resized on a browser the loading time will increase a lot.

apart from that, perhaps you can add something more on the sidebar, it looks a bit too empty, there is nothing much apart from the categories, i like it simple but adding a few social media buttons in there might help and make it look good ??

Oh, yeah…I forgot to comment on the .me domain! I’m just starting one too. Such a cool suffix ??

@ justbishop.
Thanks for the fast reply justbishop. It’s been a while since we had the ‘about me’ text like so and we’ve never really had any complaints about it. What part of it did you find confusing?

Also, was it the size of the advert that put you off or the fact that there was an advert there? I don’t get much traffic and that block barely helps me pay off the hosting but I could definitely try out other places on the blog. Thanks again for taking time out to reply. Really appreciate it.

@weddingcakes.
Thank you for your reply. I’m the only writer on the blog at the moment and having to make a post everyday to keep the traffic stable means I don’t usually have time to resize thirty to fourty images on each post. Are there any plugins that allow me to resize the images upon upload? As for the sidebar, I’ve already got a few social media icons and I’m not sure what else I could add there. Perhaps a facebook connect widget? Again, thanks for taking time out to reply.

Can’t really put my finger on it, it was just kinda…vague. Maybe just elaborating on what you already have would help?

The fact that there are ads on the site doesn’t bug me at all, but the size and position combined is just really competitive with the content. Maybe using a standard banner sized block above the post content or above the comments section on the single post pages would be better? At least it wouldn’t be visually intruding on the block of content, IYKWIM.

I’ve shrunk the current advert and tried out a new spot as a widget. I think that might fill up some space and make the sidebar feel a tad bit more professional as mentioned by weddingcakes above. I’ll look into updating the current ‘about me’ and see if I can make it clearer without the jibber-jabber. Thanks again for your feedback, I really appreciate the time you take out to post your views on my website. ??

o, its so black

Something about ad blocks that have the words “The people that sponsor us” is a bit misleading to me. You’re assuming that the people reading your blog are clicking on the advertising (which is what is paying you, not the mere fact that you are showing their ad). So really, they’d be more of a potential sponsor of x% of your total costs instead of actually sponsoring you.

Tangent, I know. Just something about people always wording their contextualized advertising blocks like that just always eats at something in the back of my brain.

While the site is very clean and well laid out, it’s almost too simple. It almost screams landing page domain coming soon template to me.

Posting in multiple categories for each post as well? Why not just accomplish basically the same thing with tags. When you post a single post in multiple categories, you’re not doing anybody any good. Sure, the categories Inspiring and Design may have 50 posts, but how many of those posts are unique and not just the same post, just listed twice? Or three times?

Replacing your native search functioning with a “custom” Google search also reinforces the earlier notion of “coming soon domain”. Why must the things I search for on your site show up on a completely different theme and website? That’s like saying “We have the information here, but in order to find it, you’ll need to go somewhere else.”

On the about page, the follow sentence struck me as weird: “Well, there are a few things you need to ask yourself, first.” The inflection on “yourself”. “There are a few things you need to ask… YOURSELF”. Also, your sidebar to content ratio on the pages is a little imbalanced. 10% of the screen devoted to content while the rest is devoted to the sidebar. Drop-down categories would fix that, but conditional sidebars would be nicer. Also, the link and title say “about” but you refer to it as the “about us” page. Continuity issue in my eyes, but really, this is a pretty minor detail.

@boyevul. First of all, I’d like to say thank you for your insightful feedback. I can take all your feedback into account with the exception of the issue with the search because of a few issues with theme. I see what you mean with the sidebar advert title. I’ll be looking into modifying that and currently, it’s blank. What do you think could make the landing page more vibrant? Perhaps a more visually appealing logo? It seems like such a basic thing but now that you mention it, it’s much more clearer from the readers point of view on how annoying multiple category listings can get. As for the search, there’s not much I can do because of issues with the theme. It’s extremely complicated and I’d rather not go into it at the moment. Also, I believe you might have the ‘about us’ page mixed up with the ‘write’ page. We’re in the process of rewriting the ‘about’ page and I’ll definitely look into adjusting the space between the two.

Thanks again for taking time out to review the website. Cannot express how useful your information is to us! Thank you! ??

I like the “wp-pagenavi” thing you got going.

You should know that your “KissInsights” is blocking the footer links (at least in FF 3.6)

Also, think about resizing your sidebar by 30%. and adding post links to your excerpt thumbs.

Other than that, I think your blog has a very clean and sophisticated look. ie the thumbs and excerpts are all the same size.

@dcoi9 Thank you for your feedback! The pagenavi took a while to get working but it was definitely worth it. It allows the regular reader to browse the website with more ease than they would with a simple ‘previous posts’ link. I personally feel it’s the best plugin I’m using. KissInsights can be minimized. Does it still block the footer links when it’s minimized? If it doesn’t block the links, does it annoy you? I’m still working my way around the way this theme is coded and trying to figure out the thumbnails. I’ll be adding the links to them along with adding thumbnails to ‘category’ pages.

Again, thank you for your feedback.

-Ray.

Think it’s a clean and fresh blog. What you could do is have an area in the right column where you summarize in 2-3 sentences what sort of posts you make apart from being a design and photography blog. From reading a few of your posts it would also fit in being a cultural magazine. Anyway good luck with your blog.

@ Casanova

Looks like you removed the KissInsights.

I personally think its cleaner without it. If you did indeed want to keep it, you could do a whole lot with css i.e. fixing it to the right side of browser screen, instead of bottom. Sidereel is a very good example of this type of social positioning.

@zezima. Thanks for your feedback, mate. I’ll consider an about me widget if the about me page doesn’t work out in the near future. Thank you for your suggestion.

@dcoi9. I’ve got the small survey back up. Would it be a little weird if I moved the links towards the left side of the footer? I don’t like the GUI of the other survey scripts. Let me know what you think. Thanks again!

@ Casanova

Yes, floating links to the left would be a good idea. Another option would be to center them relative to your content_body div. Either way, it will look good.