Advice for blog appreciated

It’s going in the right direction.

Here’s what I’d change if it were my blog:

Header is nicely designed, but creates too big a void at the top of the page. Redesign to make more horizontal.

Took a long time for me to load the page… could be that I’m in Asia.

Capitalize “home”

Do the Technorati Tags really need a background color? I would dispense with any unnecessary clutter… but I favor a more minimalist style.

The posts are too short. Two lines is not much of a teaser

Lots of dead space at the bottom of the home page.

Maybe make the grey background behind the nav bar a different more contrasty color… maybe pick up on the purple?

I like the collapsable side bar thingys.

Good work!

Looks great. yeah cap the H in Home. The banner in IE 7 tends to be cut off. Not sure how it is in FF but perhaps will try when I get home. Looks very pro. Just work on that content and you have yourself a top notch site.

I think the cutting off of the banner is more of a resolution issue… I either need to make it so that it resizes to fit different resolutions (any tips on how to do this? I’m relatively new to PHP) or I’ll just make it so that it aligns over the content area.

Yes, you’re right about the load times.. still trying to work out the balance between quality and speed.

Again, right about the background colour for the tags. It’s overwhelming the content. – I have just been putting off doing that because it means I’ll have to make a new entry in my style.css for that.

Navbar and deadspace have gone on my to-do list too!

Many thanks to both of you for giving me feedback, and practical feedback too!

Any further advice would be greatly appreciated from anyone else ??

You might have the resolution at 200 try making it 72 I bet that is what it is

Righty-ho, I’ve taken on board all of the criticisms, and I’ve made some changes to the appearance of the site.

Now it should:

load faster, fit on page in IE and 800*640, links don’t have background colour and home is now capitalised.

Is there anything else anyone can find that needs changing??

https://www.whiskeylima.com

Looks alot better.

Brilliant..
anything else anyone thinks needs tweaking??
it is a graphic design blog.. so I need brutal truths here, it HAS to look good.

I’m not feeling the dates beside the old posts, or for that matter, the title for the old posts on the frontpage.
– any comments?

many thanks!

I would try and resize those images so you can fit a little more on there. The free brushes you advertising I would lower the font to make it a single liner.
Those images are going to be tricky.

There, had a bit of a work around with it, made images in posts smaller. and simply got rid of the images for date and posts.. and I’m really not mourning them.

still a few bits that need changing to go though.. it never ends!

I’m a big fan of those collapsible sidebars too! ?? Maybe I’ll try and do something like that for one of my future sites; so nifty!

Not sure if it’s just a ‘me’ thing, but the first post (currently ‘Free Graphic Design Software?’) doesn’t seem to have any space (margin) around the text so the letters are squished right up to the border. Is this intentional?

This also vaguely applies to the ‘about’ blurb sitting to the right of the big rss icon, where there seems to be quite large size between the RSS icon and the text, but the right margin is almost non-existent and makes the text look a little squished.

Still, great job so far and better than anything I could do ??

good, good, this is the kind of feedback i need.
I have to admit, I’m not very good with PHP.. I think I just need to add something like:

margin: 8px;

right?

I think the reason for the squashed text is that I didn’t have boxes around the content before, and in an attempt to focus more on it (content is king afterall) I added the boxes.

also, I need to put in a link to the RSS Icon, I think that’s on my to do list for today!

Thanks for the help!
and really most of the reason why it looks good is because I’ve been taking advice from people on here.. it would still be very messy without!

margin:8px; would be the sort of code you’d add, although I have no idea if that’s the “ideal” number of pixels ?? I guess for the top most text, margin: 8 0 0 0; (or something similar – I always have to check my CSS :P) would give just a margin for the right side of the text.

p/s: The puffin.png picture doesn’t show up for me >_<
p/s2: The RSS icon has disappeared! Maybe you’re working on it at the moment ^^

yeah, haven’t been able to add in the link for it.. and I have NO idea why the puffin.png won’t show.. tried all sorts of things..

oh yes, and have disabled RSS icon for the minute because I’m working on it ??

For puffin.png, it seems to be linked via /includes/images/puffin.png so it might be better to place it in a folder outside of /includes ?