I can tell that you’ve been having fun with theming your own WordPress; good for you! 🙂
Since you’re asking for constructive crit, I will give you just that. If you have any questions, please feel free to ask. I will try to be as thorough as possible and explain as much of my thoughts as possible, but won’t mind clarifying if there is something I say that you don’t get. 🙂
So here we go:
Red is a very bold and assertive color that demands people to LOOK. It can be off-putting to some, but it can really make a statement if used properly.
With that said:
I LIKE:
– your banner graphic because it fuses deep reds along with black. Bold. Assertive. A bit of noise. Definitely music-related. The right hand side with the lighter red swirly slashes are slightly distracting from the rest of the graphic and could probably be removed.
– how your pages are all tabbed and easy to access in their own navigational bar. VERY important for accessibility. However, the white ‘current page’ tab is very distracting and takes away from the rest of the nice red and black tabs. I would suggest changing the color of the tab. 🙂
– how you make the content and the sidebar distinct from one another. The content is given a bold amount of space which is good because that is where you want people’s eyes to go, right? And the sidebar is nice and separate and takes up a good amount of space as well.
– The search at the top of the sidebar is handy for your visitors to have easy-access to scavenging for content.
– how you have the navigation bar at the very bottom which allows access to other parts of your site. It’s good to have a portal from where one can jump to one part of the site to another.
– the little graphical detailing such as the little graphics used in your posts – both the icon-like one in the left hand corner and the one used for your datestamp. It shows you have attention to detail and thought things through for your site. I like. 🙂
I DON’T LIKE:
– how the main content area is all grey. After all that nice red and black scheme going on, to see such a sharp contrast makes my eyes do a double take. Yes, grey background is easier to read black text from, but it honestly doesn’t match the rest of your theme. Change the color and consider simply using a solid colored background or one with minimal amount of texturing and design. 🙂
– how there are those lines right between the main content and the sidebar. Distracting, and again, it might not hurt to stick to solid colors or plain patterns. 🙂 Because, again, red and black are VERY bold and your main graphic is already quite assertive.
– how the content in the sidebar seems to be all mishmashed together. There’s ‘busy/cluttered’ and then there’s… BUSY. Maybe it’s just my browser being silly (Firefox 3.0), but it looks awfully busy in there. Section out your sidebar content a bit more; it will make it much easier for your visitors to read the content and catch up on everything! 🙂
– how the bottom navigation/portal bar that links to other parts of the website doesn’t have its own nice little background to set it aside from the rest of the layout. Currently, it looks like it’s simply a part of the main content and not its own navigation block.
– the white tab and the random red streaks on the right hand side of the main graphic.
OVERALL:
AWESOME work so far; I’m looking forward to seeing how everything will look like once you are ‘finished’ with this theme. 🙂
