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  • arharris2

    (@arharris2)


    I just finished up my new theme and I would love some feedback. I used a javascript library called Prototype windows for the main part of the theme. Although I did tweak one of the “themes” that comes with the library. I am a bit confused on how to get rid of that “<” up at the top of the page but cannot figure out where it’s at to delete it. Anyways you can view my site here. I was thinking of releasing it for download in a couple of days if I could get all of the kinks worked out (and wordpress would stop dying on me =P). Thanks for your feedback

Viewing 8 replies - 1 through 8 (of 8 total)
  • Pizdin Dim

    (@pizdin_dim)

    Easy. You most likely have an opening HTML tag somewhere at the very top of your theme’s “index.php” file.

    frotzed

    (@frotzed)

    The idea in and of itself is pretty cool. It’s not for me, I wouldn’t use it, but it’s still cool and it’s your blog so it should first and foremost make YOU happy. Don’t worry about what I think about the superficial things like “design”. That said, let me offer some constructive criticism of more important things.

    The font is very small for me. I would go no smaller than 12px. I’m a young guy with 20/20 vision and it was hard for me to read.

    The site loads very slow for me. I’m on a high speed cable connection with a decently fast computer (2.8ghz processor, 2G RAM) and things seem clunky to me. Takes a while to scroll down the page, minimize the page, etc. I’m not sure there’s any way to remedy this other than removing the javascript. But that seems to me to be a large part of the site, so you may not want to remove it.

    Other than that, I think it’s a cool idea. Go with it. BTW, that left angle bracket at the top of your page that you can’t find; it’s an extra thing in your DocType declaration in your header: `<<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN”
    “http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd”>`

    At the very beginning of the doctype there should only be one angle bracket.

    vkaryl

    (@vkaryl)

    Well that’s pretty cool! Font size is fine for me (60-ish, 20-20 with glasses, 17″ screen at 1024×768 – it’s a tad small on my 1600×1200 non-dev screen though I still don’t have a problem reading it). Site load time was under 1 sec (wildblue lowend satband). I didn’t see any problem with scrolling, minimizing, etc. – in fact, the whole thing works very very well (note please, that I’m using a real browser as opposed to anything named “IE”….)

    I’m not a fan of lime neon green, but other than that, this may be the only really “different” thing I’ve seen in a while….

    styledsheet

    (@styledsheet)

    pretty cool concept. perhaps you could have some sort of menu to open new windows?

    Pizdin Dim

    (@pizdin_dim)

    Just a question about your design: what was your intent behind offering two “panels”, with zooming capabilities and maximise, minimise, restore and (very importantly) close buttons?

    I’m not a graphic designer but I find this ridiculous from a usability point of view. What is it supposed to offer to the user? Why would I use the buttons to begin with? And if I do (for some bizarre reason) click on “x” to close the panel, what then? How do I re-open it again?

    Please don’t take offence, I’m sure you’ve put it lots of work into the theme but I’m puzzled to find anything even remotely useful about its design. By design, I mean usability design, not decoration.

    Thread Starter arharris2

    (@arharris2)

    Thanks for the critisism guys. If it loads slow for you it’s more than likly because of my crappy server. It’s p3 800mhz. It’s pretty slow in and of itself but then when you add up however far away you are and how many routers its going through, It makes it even slower. When I look at it from school it loads pretty slow.

    As for the usability concerns, I might build in a function to open back the window, or I might set it so that you can’t close the windows down at all. I’m not sure yet. But for now, the only thing that I’ve been doing is just hitting reload also for the color scheme, I’m trying to build in a function.php part that allows the site admin to switch between different looks. One look that I want to include looks like OS x. (you can see the javascript library here)

    also about the random “<“, Frotzed, you are correct, thats exactly whats causing the problem, but for some reason I keep getting that “pluggable.php” error so I cannot change it from here at school. Does anyone know if that pluggable.php error is a bug in wordpress? Because it happened to me before, then I reinstalled everything (I mean a brand new install of ubuntu) and I’m getting kindof tired of reinstalling things. Why can’t it just work?

    Alex Cragg

    (@epicalex)

    i agree, get rid of the close function, or at least let us open it back up again, cause its java, pressing back doesnt work…i ended up with a grey screen with nothing on it, which isnt the best way keep my attention 🙂

    Thread Starter arharris2

    (@arharris2)

    Alright, heres what I’ve fixed so far:
    -the random <
    -the font. I made it a touch bigger. Frotzed, I could see what you meant once I saw what it looked like on a smaller monitor. It was almost too small for me to read.
    -it shouldn’t take as long to load now. (thats should)
    -I found out that the sidebar code in my function.php file was messing with the rest of my wordpress install. So much to my dissatisfaction I was forced to remove it untill I can find a fix. =(
    -and finally, I made it so that you cannot close the windows down. The close button is still there, but it does absolutely nothing if you click it.

    Thanks for everyones help! also I have no problem with people telling me that they like it. It makes me feel important.

Viewing 8 replies - 1 through 8 (of 8 total)
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