Finally a new siteup and running

[Harold Mansfield]

I have had my own website in limbo and on a back burner for weeks now and I finally had some time to get it together.

I am still adding to the "Portfolio" section but the basics are in place, and it's got a gliche or two that I just don't have time to work out, but I don't think it's noticable.

After looking at it for so long, I could use some honest critiques to shape up the way I see it.
1st Internet Media | Freelance Wordpress Webmaster, Customizations, Wordpress Support | V-Bulletin Forums | 707-70-MEDIA (http://www.1stinternetmedia.com/)

[Business Attorney]

Nice job, Harold. I think the site has really come together well.

[Harold Mansfield]

Nice job, Harold. I think the site has really come together well.

Thanks David.

[Patrysha]

I am not crazy about the blue boxes on the left, but I do like it overall. I'm a huge fan of Wordpress...but I mostly just customize templates...it's so time consuming to do a theme right...so I admire you guys for that.

Great job!

[Harold Mansfield]

I am not crazy about the blue boxes on the left, but I do like it overall. I'm a huge fan of Wordpress...but I mostly just customize templates...it's so time consuming to do a theme right...so I admire you guys for that.

Great job!

Honestly, the method to my madness on the boxes was only the header was important to indicate what was in that row and that I could sacrifice the actual content inside the boxes, basically keeping it for symmetry and aesthetics, but encouraging people to over look it to get to the more important (and easier to read) information about what I do.

That all made sense at 5 a.m. the day I was trying to get it done and rushing through the last few things..not so much now.

You know how it is when you've been staring at one thing for hours and it's the wee hours of the morning...sticking a frayed wire into the wall to get electricity to the lamp at the other end starts to sound doable :)

[Business Attorney]

Looking at Patrysha's comment, I tend to agree. What if you switched the heading and body text styles on those boxes, so that the heading is white text on a blue background and the body text is white on gray. That would give you some blue but not so much.

[vangogh]

Harold at first glance I liked it. My initial impression was good. I do agree about the blue boxes, but to me it's more that it gets too crowded. I think you're trying to do too much in that space.

I'd either keep the tips or the clients, but drop the other and I'd also get rid of the social media buttons on the home page. Even on the internal pages the social media buttons seem like too much. Ask yourself why people visiting the site are going to want to connect with you at 124bpms. The truth is they aren't. Not on this site.

I think the connecting with your profiles would work better on your about page or in the sidebar, but not on every page. With too many social buttons it gets confusing which one to click.

[Harold Mansfield]

Harold at first glance I liked it. My initial impression was good. I do agree about the blue boxes, but to me it's more that it gets too crowded. I think you're trying to do too much in that space.

I'd either keep the tips or the clients, but drop the other and I'd also get rid of the social media buttons on the home page. Even on the internal pages the social media buttons seem like too much. Ask yourself why people visiting the site are going to want to connect with you at 124bpms. The truth is they aren't. Not on this site.

I think the connecting with your profiles would work better on your about page or in the sidebar, but not on every page. With too many social buttons it gets confusing which one to click.

I can see that. To be honest, I couldn't think of what to use to fill that space up...it was basically a space filler ( the icons).

As you probably gathered this is a licensed design...and the coding on it is a total nightmare. I have never seen anyone release a theme that needed this many file edits just to get the layout functioning.

Not a problem for me (or you) but there is no way an average user could implement it....it's ridiculous.

I actually took out a 3rd row on it..to get it down to 2, but I'm thinking I agree that one is enough.
The design has more space than I have content to fill...I was kind of hoping to grow into it :)

[Spider]

Maybe you guys are looking at it from a technical angle, but the measure of a website, to me, is how the target audience is going to see it. This is how I think a normal business owner or organization head will view it--

1. The "flash" stuff immediately following the header is a technical marvel and my immediate impression was "Very clever!" But would I want a "very clever" site, or do I want a site that told my public about my business? And could this fellow give me what I want. (I'm sure you could, Harold, but I have come to know you through SBF - what opinion would a stranger draw?)

2. The sliding panels took my eye away from the header, so I enter the site without knowing who's site it is. I would have preferred the panels to slide gracefully but they jerked their way across and back.

3. From the sliding panels, my eye was drawn back to the "707-70-MEDIA" (my gaze now going in the wrong direction) because of the bright color, probably, and I wondered if this was the name of the company! I didn't immediately associate it with being a telephone number.

4. I don't think a black background with light-colored text is very business-like unless you are a music company, a night club, perhaps a major league sports team, or a porn site. I accept that all the above are businesses, but not the majority of businesses or organizations, and not the type of business I am imagining myself for the sake of this review. If that is your target market, then your color scheme is probably right on!

5. I didn't actually read any of the text to try to comprehend it but only to see if I could read it - and such small text, colored grey on charcoal did not make that easy. I tried to increase the size of the text to make reading easier and found the text-size button on my browser toolbar had been disabled. I was forced to use the magnifier control in the status line of my browser. Unfortunately, this control magnifies everything, including the width of your pages and now I had to use a full width window to get the whole page, or scroll sideways. This made the lines of text on the About, FAQs and Blog pages uncomfortably long to read.

6. I also found the light-colored text on the pale blue ground difficult to read. And the unconventional dating (2010-02-08 04:25:00) drew attention to itself without any obvious purpose, especially when the post was dated more conventionally once opened.


I wish I didn't feel so gloomy after perusing your hard work - probably a result of the colorscheme - as I'm sure you have done a marvelous job.

[vangogh]

couldn't think of what to use to fill that space up...it was basically a space filler

Why do you have to fill every bit of space. Whitespace is good. Don't try to cram as much as you can in.


Maybe you guys are looking at it from a technical angle

I can only speak for myself. I wasn't looking at the site from a technical angle. I looked at it from the perspective of a person who landed on the site.

I'm not crazy about the sliding panels either, though I think it's done with Ajax and not Flash. I don't mind it though and I think the way the page first loads it's fine. The panel you see initially is the one with the eye and the WordPress logo as the pupil. I would think eborg's typical client would recognize the logo, though perhaps not. Maybe a tagline under the site logo or making the words in the panel larger so it stands out more that the site is about WordPress development.

Frederick I'm generally with you on the black background. It's usually not my favorite. I think it's ok here since this site is meant as a portfolio site for someone who does design/development. It's more common to see non-white backgrounds on those sites. Still not my favorite choice, but more typical of the industry. In this case I think it works for the target market as you suggest.

[Harold Mansfield]

I think that I will experiment with a few things that were mentioned:

Using a lighter or white background.
Change the blue text boxes
Find something else to fill the space with redundant social icons.
Enlarge the text on the box captions.

Hopefully I can get to it this weekend.

[Harold Mansfield]

Finally got back around to it and did change a few things as well as, starting to add more stuff to the portfolio.

This design is such a pain in the butt. It is coded all wrong, and ridiculously redundant. Everything is a hack just to get the simplest thing done and nothing is in what would be the most logical spot, all of the sections are all over the place and it has NO admin customization options.

I've put so much time into getting it to work that I can't fathom changing it right now. It's like sitting at a Blackjack table and knowing that you are on a bad loosing streak, but figure what's another $100?..you're in this far.

[vangogh]

Sometimes though, it's better to start over again from scratch. It's more time now, but it will save time and headaches in the long run.