Feedback on design please!
I've finally gotten over the stupid pride I felt at having designed this all on my own, and now realize that it's probably time I rethought the design of the site.
So all of you who browse the site but never post - you know who you are - let me know how I can improve it, what's wrong with it, so that I can do an informed and educated redesign at some point. You can comment to me in private or can generate discussion by leaving a comment.
Things I'd like to change...
- The "navigate" box on the left isn't very intuitive, and the quite significant difference in importance between, for example, the "film reviews" section and the "random stuff" section doesn't come through.
- The right hand side of my screen is cluttered with admin functions, but i recently realized that other users don't see much there at all. So I have space to play with.
- I'd like to automatically link back to blogs that send people my way - so you'd have a box with automatic links to the last 5 or 10 weblogs that had referred someone to me. I'd have to maintain a database of weblogs or artificially exclude Google, Hotbot, IMDB etc that send me loads of hits.
- Nobody uses the advertising function, even though it's free. I have no idea why. Any ideas? Maybe my site is too low on the rankings in google and others for people to think it's worthwhile.
- I have some semi-permanent content in mind in the form of some longer posts that contain more of a discussion or treatment of something near and dear to my heart - I think it's important to beef up the content, because the weblog/film-review stuff is good, but insufficient to populate the site.
- I have to rewrite a lot of the interface for admin functions, the text is too small, boxes for entering articles too narrow, and it doesn't scale too well beyond a certain point.
- Not sure about the colours any more. The green is kind of Slashdot-influenced, but I don't go there that often anymore, and it makes the whole site a little grim.
- Thinking about changing my no-pictures rule. Bankwidth isn't even close to 10% of my maximum, and they add colour to the journal entries.
Please feel free to comment on that lot and to add anything you think is useful.
Posted by nlvp at March 5, 2003 06:34 PM