Umm, I don’t mean to be critical but your template and design could use some work...
I’m always amazed at the amount of praise mediocre sites receive and I know MODX and a template system is capable of a whole lot more. Throw in some decent css skills (like CssZenGarden) and you’ve got a winner on your hands.
hate to say, but you just tell me to do a better job.. but that is just saying you don’t like the setup. Something that is fine with me.
If you want to critique, what I really prefer, please tell me WHAT I should change or improve. This is much more usefull than just telling that the design is no good.
Please keep in mind I wanted to design a simple, straight forward site. Not a whole lot bells, horns and whissles. Simple and straight forward. Since content will stay fairly static.
Fair enough my man, so here are a few things:
Font-size: Why not categorise relevence of links by font-size? Side bar elements use 9 or 10px values with bold to set headings apart, in your body layout your main heading (a <h1> I hope) is huge compared to the sub-heading following it. Why not try and use consistent heading variations i.e. h1 = 14px, h2=12px p=10px.
Padding & Margins: Give your content some room to breath. Why is your sidebar content almost touching the paragraphs on the right? Pad that sucker man! The headings in the sidebar have more left-padding or margin than the links, why not align them equally?
Do you really need that breadcrumb trail at the top of the page when you have your main navigation there anyway, you’re telling people to not bother reading the content, just click away here.
Heading Colors: Try keeping it similar, I like the lighter blue you’ve used in the sidebar, it would contrast well with the text in your main column plus help people to quickly scan headings.
If I get a chance at some point I might do a quick mockup in photoshop for you to illustrate what I’m talking about.
Quote from: Marschant at Jun 12, 2006, 09:26 AM
Do you really need that breadcrumb trail at the top of the page when you have your main navigation there anyway, you’re telling people to not bother reading the content, just click away here.
Nice feedback, but I don’t quite agree with this one. When you have site structure where page trail can build atleast up to "
Home »
Game Gurus »
BattleField » Guns & Grenades", I think that the usage of it improves usability of the site and so is well justified.
BTW, Came to mind from that last sentence, that justfying the text in articles could look good too!
Altought not everyone likes justifying.. just a thought.
"He can have a lollipop any time he wants to. That's what it means to be a programmer."
Agreed with Marschant about margins. Margins (and that between your left nav and the content in particular) are not to be forgotten of. They have power to turn a clean nice layout into crap.
