Please give me feedback on my layout/overall design

I thought I'd throw a little time at a personal website, and the result was www.bluefuzion.com. I'm a programmer mostly, but recently picked up HTML (familiarizing myself with various standards) and css.

Everything ont he site at the moment is generated from content stored in a mysql database (except for the phpBB, of course!) and I'm planning on working at it until it's a fully configurable home page package, something people can install and configure like OSComm, for example.

I originally used the Doctype XHTML 1.0 Strict and sent it as application/xhtml+xml. Althought it worked perfectly in any MODERN browser that is regularly updated, alot of problems surfaced, so i decided to switch back to HTML 4.01 strict and send it as text/html. IE was banned, but I've considered writing a little php to make the pages accomodate IE's, shall we say, handicaps. Unfortunately, the site is still horribly broken in IE.

Ovcerall, I feel that the site is good in that it uses alot of images for backgrounds and such, yet the site will load perfectly and be readable and accessable even if the images haven't loaded or are even broken.

well... feast your eyes:

BLUEFUZION.COM

It looks great.. but it doesn't validate (though you state on the site that it conforms to the standards)

Where at? I know the blog doesn't validate because theblogging engine I wrote generated invalid blcokquote placement, but I think that's it... gotta get that fixed

First of all, some of the text is really hard to read, not enough contrast. Hard on the main portion, hardest on the side column, where they are tiny to boot.

Simple logic, if its too hard, no one will bother. The effort / reward ratio on your site, is heavy on the effort and light on reward.

However, the most detrimental aspect of your site is failure to support IE. If the app you are trying to develop won't work with IE, guess how many people will want to use it?

Its a cruel world dude.

Yea, I hate IE too, but it's what the world uses. If you want to do your own browsing with something else, then by all means, go for it. But if someone hits your site with IE, like I first tried to, you'll never see them again. And there goes 95% of your audience.

Nice safe colour scheme. But yea, the text is too hard to read.

Cheers

-Jaeger

You can use XHTML 1.0 Transitional for better compatibility. I don't use IE myself but over 80% of user do.

I agree that font size for the left menu is too small.

Using dotted border for links is cute but will be mistaken for abbr or acronym.

Change the blockquote to div and class and it would work fine.

Site looks good but such colours are best for MEDIA type site which do not have a lot ot text. For sites with a lot of text, clarity is more important. Increase the contract between background and text colour to achieve a better outlook.

Good luck

Thanks! I'm probably going to try increasing the contrast a bit more, as well as increase the font sizes a bit...

as for ie, I think I'm going to have to make a list of what problems IE has with my site and make an alternative stylesheet for it.

This is your opinion which is fine, everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but you are limiting the visiters to your site to a VERY small percentage of the worlds population as IE is what people use. Is that what you want? If so why the hell did u create the site in the first place.......?? For the elite few that have a different browser and often a grudge agains M$!!!!

strange......



Standard....hate to tell you this but IE IS the STANDARD !! however much you dislike that fact!!

If you want your site to be successful then all web designers know that you need to make it accessible to as many people as possible within your audience...therefore supporting the IE and others...


other than this, you have a nice site,

RF

I don't care.. it's my site, and as such, I can decide who I want in it or not.. it's not as if the site is being used to sell a product.

As for IE... I believe that people will soon move to the better alternatives that exist.. IE7 isn't due out at LEAST until 2006... and I see absolutely no reason we must be forced to deal with it's broken CSS2 support and it's overall bad rendering engine, bugs, bnroken DOM2 support, inability to properly use semi-transparent png images, and everything else that microsoft is just too darn lazy to fix.

Anyone who feels that IE is a "good" browser that is "standard compliant" ...

... needs a hole in their head

better browsers exist out there people, and there's no excuse for using IE because it is the default loaded on windows (which, I may add, MS insanely claims is neccisary for windows to function properly, one of the many reasons I migrated to FreeBSD ages ago).

Blah, I won't go into it though, too much of a rant. I do however agree with you, accessability is important, despite the author's ill feelings towards the viewer that unfortunately 80% of the population uses.