Site revamped — would like feedback

there is no question that this is a very impressive “site”. I say site because that is what it is. It is not a blog in almost any sense of the word anymore. You have taken the wordpress platform and functionality and really created a beautiful site. vEry nice job!

I am not sure I am as big a fan of the bottom footer section with the diagonal line. I will say it is different, but not sure what it accomplishes. But it is different that is for sure.

overall, great job and really impressive.

Very nice work. The whole flow of the site comes together very nicely and the colors are very relaxing which fits your sites them when it comes to meditation. Hard to believe it is even wordpress really from who it looks. Looks so different to me, but these days you never know what’s what with how far a little coding gets you these days. Very nice work.

@jthebault: The drop-down is adapted from examples I found at cssplay.co.uk.

@mb168: I’m glad the example’s useful to you. I also had reservations about a change in layout from the home page to the inner page, but having a left menu on the home page was becoming increasingly unwieldy as new sections were added to the site. So a horizontal menu to get to the main sections seemed inevitable. But the vertical menu on the inner pages also seemed inevitable — although I’m concerned that sometimes when the menu is expanded it’s rather long.

@TYVDiner. Thanks for the kind comments. The site never really was a blog. I had a static HTML site until March last year and then I converted it to WordPress using Pages.

But then we had the blogging capabilities and started adding materials to that. 2000 articles later the blog is a major part of the site in terms of size, although I still see the structured sections (using Pages) as equal in importance.

The sole reason I used a diagonal was because I just get so damn fed up of seeing rectangles! In fact I considered having photographs that were tilted — of course they’d be rectangular but with transparency I could make them appear to be at an angle. It looked nice with a -5% rotation, but would have been too much work. I like the idea of having quirks like that.

@wolfwood207: Thank you.

Great theme, I love the colours but i would improve a few things.

1.) I know this might sound stupid, but instead of writing just “search”, i would maybe put in “Hit Enter to Search” or something like that.

2.) your favicon looks nice, but it doesn’t really relate to your sites colour scheme or design

3.) adding a logo of some sort or using a wackier font for your site name could improve branding

4.) usually a visitor to your site will quickly scan your content (and consequently the site design) and then decide weather or not to continue his or her stay. In the case of your site I needed a few seconds to establish what the main idea was. I would maybe suggest adding some sort of message which is quickly recognizable (design-wise) and can instantly tell a visitor what your site is about.

5.) your CSS is not valid, it has one mistake ??

Apart from that ?? great work!

Hi Wedmeda,

1. You may be right — I might well be overestimating the web-savviness of the average punter. I’ll give that some thought.

2. Well spotted! It actually matches our old logo. I’ll have to sort that.

3. I’ve been planning to add a logo. The idea is to commission one on 99designs.com.

4. This is a really important thing — what, specifically, would have helped you understand at a glance what the site is about?

5. Also well-spotted. I should not edit code while sleep-deprived. Just took down my wife’s blog by doing that. Sigh.

I’d really appreciate your thoughts about (4). I’m in many ways too close to the site to see how to take care of that kind of marketing detail.