http://www.elneri.info

I'd like to hear your opinions on a personal website that I recently redesigned (content is still mostly in draft phase).

http://www.elneri.info

Thanks in advance,

NotGoddess

First off, I do like that menu on the top.. simple but very effective. Just needs some CSS to make the visited pages links not go purple. Also, I know the name is a home link, but maybe a home link in the menu would be nice too. The text for the name and motto doesn't quite sit properly over the background at the top of the page. Maybe an image for the name/motto?

Other than that, a bit more color below the top 2 inches of the site would be nice, and it may help pickout the boxed areas.

This maybe a personal preference, but I think your main content box would look better were you to shrink it horizontall somewhat. Doing this would also look better if you were to shrink that text down a bit. In doing that you'll give yourself more room to work with. Just a suggestion though.

G'luck.

Thank you both for the feedback.
I've made a few changes since the initial post-I still have a few more, so I'll post when that's done.

Binky: I laughed when I saw your comment about color below the top 2inches. I agree, but don't want to add more images, especially if they are just 'Hey I'm a picture!' sorts. I've done some coloring of the borders for now, we'll see how that sits.

Binky: I did some usability testing and realized that while most do know a logo is often a link, my primary users didn't know it until they stumbled across it, so I added a 'home' link to the other pages and made the logo itself flash blue on hover.

MaxM: I find it a little wide for my own preference, as well, but the primary users are 50+ viewing on a 15-17in monitor with 800x600 resolution. They thought the font was 'small' even though it is normal size.
I don't want to get into resolution/screen checks but I'll see what I can do to make it more res-friendly.

Thank you, and keep the ideas coming-you wouldn't know it but the interior of the site has been reworked a few times to implement ideas proposed and that's made it better, so I really appreciate it.

NotGoddess

Just as a random question, how are you retrieving the data from the journals?

I wrote an atom feed parser in php.
You configure the feed link(s), # of posts to display, etc and it returns a <div><dl> format you use CSS to style.
When the page loads it will refresh the feeds if they are 12+ hours old (so I'm not constantly hitting my journals) or display a cached page.

I'll eventually clean it up/add options and put it on my tutorial site, but if you are interested, or have other questions, let me know and I can push it up.

Thanks a lot for the offer. I'd be really curious in looking at the way it works. I've become able to do anything internally on my websites that I want in PHP, so may as well develop to grab things externally.