Simplification

ermm, ok..

1. less posts on the front page
2. lighten up the grey in some areas.. it tends to just be a big grey blur to me atleast
3. increase the line height on your text, that will improve readability tons.

4. fluff:

a. the tags are useless the way youve used them (unwieghted). if it were me, i would kill em or change the way they’re displayed.
b. the “site policies” — how bout another page for that? with a link in the footer??
c. you have a categories section AND a feed section. Those are combinable using get_cats or list_cats, something like that. I do it on my site, so I know its do-able.
d. the stats in the header — no-one cares, and i say that ONLY because you have so much else going on. Ask me, and that needs to go all-together, or be placed signifigantly lower on the page, like the footer.

e. same with the “powered by wordpress” in the header” It ought to be lower on the page.

Your site looks like a reallllly busy phpNUKE portal, not a blog, and its quite unreadable. I really dont mean to be harsh, but I cant help it.

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A rule of thumb: Follow the above the fold rule. the most important stuff, if possible, needs to go there. Everything else takes away.

Just to add to what has been said above (yes, I agree with that):
– Powered by WP does not belong to the title line
– you have: recent posts, latest post on the top in two places – Why? Let me see those latest posts without forcing me to roll ??
– what is the rationale for those “blurbs” in the sidebar?

WOW!! To me, I think they have about half of the site’s that are index in Google itself, right there on their own index page… but, I could be off by a few here and there though.. Who needs Google anymore…let’s go there instead!

spencerp

Just was kidding lol. But I do agree with moshu and whooami though..

also, and this is mostly a functional issue:

Youve replaced the normal behaviour of having the post title be a link to the actual post. Instead you have “read”.

2 things: The hower cover (again more grey) renders the read unreadable. And I have to wonder why you did that at all. It just adds more words to the front page, and NO functionality since the original behaviour of WP already took care of that. Unless of course your using that to track “the most read/viewed posts”, in which case that plugin ought to be rewritten, or killed.

Well, I found I had to skim an awful lot of fluff to get to actual content. The content shoudl be front and center (not quite literally) and obvious. A reader shouldn’t have to guess at what they should read first. All the meta info that you have above the post should be below – I don’t want to read about the post first, I want to read the actual post. ?? And that meta text shoudl be smaller/ less bold / less something than the post text itself.

You’ve just tried to cram everything on the first page, and all I wanna see is the content. ??

May I just say I agree with all of the above, and would like to make mention of your RSS feeds. I’m not sure that anyone would really ever need or want to subscribe to the “about this site” RSS feed ALONE, much less any of the other category specific ones – so why not just leave it up to them to subscribe to the site as a whole or not and then they can sort through what they wish to read. I say this because your list is confusing – and makes subscribing to more than one “category” time consuming.

I agree – it’s just far too much, over half of which is unnecessary, all crammed into one page.

Think “Zen”!

Whoa – thank you one and all for the comments – I’ll have to digest them and adjust the theme accordingly – but today I’ve gotten a lot of feedback from several different directions ??

Thanks ??

The site now screams: information overload. Have a look at my themes: https://wp.berkano.net – they’re much simpler and easier to read.

I’d remove the “Blog accessed x times …”etc out of header. Put it on the footer or bury it in a sidebar, but clean up the header. I’d probably also move the “Powered by” bit out of the header as well.

Those two minor changes would go a long ways towards removing the “busy” look (imho).