A Call for Criticism

I’m a big fan of this horizontal approach, which I’ve now seen done well on quite a few sites, including yours. That said, here’s some nit-picking:

The middle section could do with something more to draw me in – at the moment it is considerably smaller, with just the excerpt, than the header and footer sections.

Links all behave differently on the front page – in the content, two of the links lose the text-decoration on hover, and one has no change. In the footer, in three places the text-decoration goes, but in the previous posts , there’s only a slight, and almost unnoticeable colour change. (I like the method of losing the underline when hovering over a link rather than the other way round, btw)

In the header, when you hover over a menu tab next to the currently active one, you end up with two large blocks of white with no gap between. Perhaps it’s a very personal preference, but a small border to break these up would look better.

But as I said, mere nit-picks.

Thanks chrishes and cybrarian. These are all really helpful. I like using Georgia as the body font instead of a sans-serif font, espeically at this large font size. (I tend to like serif fonts at large sizes than sans-serif fonts).

I agree that the menubar needs a little work…would probably work better with a different hover color altogether (something between orange and white, perhaps?). I’ll give that a try this weekend.

The link behavior is a good point…there are also different fonts in the different links too…dunno why I’ve done that. I need to do something to distinguish the :hover, :visited, and :active states of my links.

One thing that has been bothering me a lot lately is the horrible look of my comments. See here:

https://www.clioweb.org/archive/2005/09/01/history-carnival-15/#respond

Any suggestions there too would be appreciated. I want to keep the “two-colum” look that I use throughout my site, but I’m drawing a blank on how to distinguish each comment.