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New Site Critique?

J

jordanste

macrumors member
Original poster
Feb 25, 2006
83
0
Hey everyone, a site that I did just launched recently and I've seen a lot of people get on here and ask for site reviews and critiques. I have even participated in a few of them. I figure if I'm making notes on other people's work I should give them the opportunity to do the same for me, and take advantage of it. I mean shoot. What's better than some helpful criticism?

I have spent a good amount of time on these forums reading, asking questions, and learning--overall. So some of you that have helped me with various things can hopefully see that it's paid off. Thanks for that.

I can't say that I'll be able to make every change you might suggest, as the client is quite happy with it as is, but I may be able to persuade him into a few.

The site is a political blog for a journalist in San Antonio, Tx... to give you some background.

Anyway, enough of my rambling.

The url is www.thefbm.com

Also, after seeing some of his recent posts... I feel like I should make some sort of disclaimer as the content may have the potential to be somewhat controversial.

I am not the author of this site, I do not provide or have anything to do with content posted and I do not necessarily maintain or support any of the author's views, beliefs, claims, etc...
 
I think it looks pretty good, but one thing I would definitely change is putting more space between posts. It's a little difficult to see where one ends and the next begins, especially because of the line right above the post meta data. It's also a little too wide for my taste, which might be a problem on smaller screens (netbooks??!!), but that's probably just a personal preference.
 
awesome, thanks for the feedback. I went ahead and increased the margin between the articles up to 12px top and bottom from 4. i had overlooked that. breathes much better now. the width is 960px. we actually started with an 800px width and he wasnt too happy with the cramped feeling of the articles with the side bar having to be so wide for those ads. and i had heard a lot about the 960 grid system, which i didnt use but figured that was a good width so i upped it to 960px. i figured most displays could handle it alright these days, but i definitely hadnt considered netbooks. ill think about that one.

thanks again for the feedback.
 
ok first impressions (with above taken into consideration)
- width isn't an issue to me (20"ws display)
- gap between posts could be increased to I'd say 3 times what it currently is

Me being overly picky here
- the white 'front page' in the grey bar at the top needs to be moved a little to the right so its all in line. Same with Mar and Subscribe sub headings on the left.
- Theres also something that isn't quite right with the logo at the top but I can't quite put my finger on it.
- Your blue headers are slightly to the left of their main text below.
- The four sections in the grey at the bottom - I'd switch the make a suggestion and sitemap around so that the bits with sections fall under the main text and the block of text falls under the ads section.

Other than that it doesn't seem to bad
 
Apart from separating the posts quite a bit more, I think using the same style of the bottom yellow links for the links in the archive section would improve the difference between the two columns and would look better IMHO.
 
hey everyone, thanks so much for the helpful notes. I've seperated the posts even more, and I will talk to my client about changing the link styles for the archive section as that one will be more difficult to slip past him. Thanks a lot everyone!
 
I like the banner, otherwise it looks like every blog site :)...not sure if that's good or bad though, haha.
 
not sure what you mean about the About and Contact links... the search bar does extend past the sidebar width, odd i never noticed I'll see if I can track that down... little things.

Also for all the comments about the logo at the top, my client actually designed that himself, then ofcourse merged all the layers before he saved it. I asked him to send me the .psd and its pretty much uneditable. I am not in any way a designer and I'm going to talk to him about seriously spending some cash on getting a solid logo designed by a solid designer.

Thanks again everyone so much for taking the time to help me perfect this. This is a huge step for me.
 
jordanste said:
not sure what you mean about the About and Contact links... the search bar does extend past the sidebar width, odd i never noticed I'll see if I can track that down... little things.
Click to expand...

Strange, it's working for me now in FF. Maybe you fixed it. However it's still the same story in Safari (see attachment). Not sure what's going on since your HTML validates...
 

Attachments

  • banner_problem.png
    banner_problem.png
    7.3 KB · Views: 170
Whoa, I havent seen that before.

Yeah I spent some time last night making sure everything validated. Most of it was little things.

Ive put it through browser shots a couple of times and never saw anything like that. Ive tried it myself in Safari, Opera, and Firefox on a mac, and Safari, Firefox and IE 7 on Windows.

I wonder what could be causing that... I have those darkened bars at the top set to width: 100%

HTML: 
#main_nav {
	font-size: 14px;
	width: 100%;
	background-color: #3f3f3f;
}

I wonder how many people are seeing this...
 
Haha, I guess I'll just hope that no one else is seeing that, I mean I guess it doesnt obstruct readability or anything so it isnt that major... just ugly. Thanks again guys!
 
It looks great, in my opinion. Very clean & crisp. I'd increase the space between posts, though.
 
Everyone keeps saying to increase the space between posts, I have increased it by quite a bit already and I'm a bit hesitant to increase it further... Would it help if I increased the font size of the article titles? or is it just that line above the article footer that is throwing everyone off? maybe I should add another line below the article footer as well?
 
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