Gray’s Blog – WITH LINK

The good stuff is in the background and colors. Overall this design is quite functional and easy on the eyes. Nice touch with the Santa-ized logo, though I’ll point out that the subtitle (“where we write…”) is much too small and the fine type is breaking.

The mouseover “read more” popup layers are just unecessary and annoying… They occur for the entire text block and are on-screen more than off. They hide the text beneath, are not particularly helpful, and I don’t see where they have any advantage over a well-placed and designed static link.

Search box is a little confusing on my end. Just a black block with an icon until I actually click in and get a cursor; this might not work for less-savvy users. Maybe you could set a default “Search” string and/or put a border around the text entry area to set it apart from the black block.

Rest of the sidebar looks pretty good, with the strong contrast and solid type choices.

Post titled: Far Cry 2 Review is a perrrrfect example of why I think the tags should follow the content or excerpt, not vice versa.

Pretty impressive overall. The popup “read mores” are the only dealbreaker.

Thanks, I have removed the Read Mores and title pop-up layer. But I kept them on the ads in the upper-right so they can get a quick informer on where they are about to go.

Additionally, to point out the search box. I have words that say ‘Type in what you want to search for…’ and when you click on it the words will disappear letting you type in your search terms.

two very quick and effective changes!!

Much better. 8.5 out of 10 if you change the text string to “Search Here” and put your tags after your excerpts.