Site Review Requested

Hey John:

Interesting template design. A couple things that I noticed:

1. Your right sidebar is out of control. It’s far longer than the main content area (and you don’t have a short main content area).

2. The rendering of some of the ads is out of whack. I’m using Firefox on Windows XP Pro. I noticed some Google ads in the middle of a post (stretching beyond the content container). The header ad, under your Gadget Guru logo pushes to the right which makes the whole design off balance.

Ready for the bad news?

I just looked at the site in IE6 on Windows. Too many rendering issues to even talk about. Train wreck. You might want to consider using a different tempalte.

Thank you very much for taking the time to look in on it. A couple of things, though.

Your point about the ads is well taken; obviously, they won’t scale at different resolutions, so I’ll just have to use a smaller ad format. As for the alignment of that stupid banner ad at the top, I’ve got to come up with another place to display it. (Perhaps in the loop, under the first post?).

I, too, have viewed the site under IE6. I usually pull the site up under IE, Opera, Firefox, and Lynx after an editing session to ensure that everything renders properly. After reading your comment about IE, I panicked and tried it out. It seems to render OK here. Perhaps you caught me in the middle of an edit? I was trying to get an Awstats plugin working last night/this morning, and it was trashing my whole layout until I deactivated it.

As for the sidebars: with this template, it’s challenging to present all of the information I’d like to have in the sidebar, due to the space between the boxes, and the dragbar portion of the boxes themselves that take up so much room.

I guess maybe it is time to start thinking about a different theme. I’ve been thinking about a 3 column design for awhile anyway. Any suggestions in that regard?

Thanks again for your feedback, I really appreciate it.

Hi John – You were right, must have been a temporary IE display issue. I checked again, and the layout is back to normal.

I’d suggest either a 3 column layout, or scrapping (or at least shortening) some of your sidebar content.

Good luck.

I think first I’ll probably scrap the Ad box…it gets no action anyway. That should pare the sidebar down quite a bit. Then I’ll set to work on getting it to work with a new theme. I’m currently working on the CSS for https://zed1.com/wp-themes/journalized-winter.png, but as a novice, it’s slooooow going ??

Thanks again!

You could also get rid of the shout box, it made the site load really slow for me and made scrolling hell. Shoutboxes are just there for abuse anyways ??

Shoutbox and Ad box are gone. It should shave a second or two off of the load time. I tested it 10 straight times, flushing cache between each, and the average was 2.27 seconds. Not bad, I guess.

Thanks for the help, keep it coming!

Hi GadgetGuru,

Just took a look at your current site and theme.

Things I like:

– The background to your sidebar elements. Very pleasing to my eye.

– The innovative (to me, anyway) use of the navigation aid floating on the left

Things I like not so much:

– It’s hard to pin it down to anything, but I felt like I would glaze over if I tried to absorb much of the content on the page. I wonder if using a different color / styling for entry headings than your normal links might help add a sense of ‘variety’ and ‘trackability’ as you scroll down the page?

– It’s utterly nit-picking (but you did ask for brutal!), but the use of a fixed width header / logo with a page that scales in width to accomodate the browser left me feeling like the header / logo was something of an oddity on the page. I wanted to resize my browser so the content of the page was the same width as the header / logo.

Overall, I like the theme. I had to dig deep to find anything to criticise. I think it could be improved, but then I say that knowing that I probably couldn’t design a theme as nice as that if my life depended on it. ??

Much warmth,

planetthoughtful

Well, I couldn’t resist my urge to leave Crimson Milk behind, and I switched themes last night. CM is a wonderful layout, but the sidebar boxes and rounded content div’s were a bit restrictive.

I still need to tweak the CSS a little bit, but I really love the colorscheme of the new theme.

Sorry to do this to you after all your hard work, especially planetthogutful…I really appreciated the fact that you took the time to dig so deeply. Hopefully, you’re up to the challenge again ??

I’m still very interested to hear what you guys think.

With sincere gratitude,

GG