Nice, nice, bright and sunny!
Pretty cool… although I have two issues.
1) The header image, while attractive and nicely mood-setting for the site is a bit excessive in size (both in pixels and bytes) for my taste.
2) Your text seems to be running partially under the right sidebar in windows that are 800px wide or less (Firefox 9.1 in Linux).
Great start, though. It’s good to see people not being discouraged by little things like PHP and CSS.
I definitely have to agree on #1. Seems like we should get to have to have something to read without having to scroll down right off the bat.
Scroll down or not this blog is well worth reading. The posts are absolutely priceless 😉
Anonymous
wow, that image radiates so much happiness and sunshine its hard to fault it for being as big as it is. but perhaps it would be better on a splash page at full size, and within the blog itself you could display a smaller, more normally sized portion of it.
while everyone’s taking a look at fun wordpress powered sites, i wondered if y’all could take a gander at a project i’m working on right now: http://www.homegrownbrands.com/!wp. its being conceived of as sort of a cross between a daily inspiration site and a photolog. some notes on the site itself… click on the calendar to move to the image for that day. and the images i’m using are currently sized at 800×600, so please resize your window to those approximate dimensions. i’m also unsure about whether to include quotes with the images or not (you can see quotes for the images in june). do the quotes work or do they just get in the way? perhaps i should think about integrating them in differently?
thanks for any comments!
I have to say I don’t agree with the complaints about image size, for a few reasons:
- I hate splash screens. If there is a choice between scrolling down to read something and having to click through a splashy introduction (and program cookies and bookmarks not to return to the splash every time you reload) then I would go for the former.
- It’s a fun picture that sets the mood of the page. It has detail and it is pretty (although not exactly what I’d pick). Regular readers may like to get straight to the text, but first time readers will like the graphic. These groups need to be balanced against each other.
- The text isn’t too far down! On a screen with 1000px vertical space at least you can read an entire post before you need to scroll.
- Scrolling is pretty essential anyway. I can think of very few sites where I don’t have to scroll to get what I want. Half a mouse-wheel revolution for the sake of a picture is not going to kill me.
The only problem I can see is if this site gets so many hits that bandwidth allowances cause difficulties. Otherwise, I love the site. If you change anything then cross-test the alignment of the menu column (right) in other browsers. It escapes its place in Firefox 0.9/WinXP.
