phoat.com

Phoat
19 years, 10 months ago

phoat.com v0.9… Ok guys, I’m almost done with my blog design and need the praise/critisism to keep me going.
Right now, only the index is styled. There is no working photoalbum on the site yet, the recent photo thumbnails are manually put there so i can get the layout down. I’m still looking for a photolog thingy, (besides the obvious choices of Pictoralis and iPAP – both of which i couldn’t get to work). I’m going to try my hand at implementing a simple photoblog that is integrated into the upload page in WP’s admin. If anyone wants to help, contact me through the site. My email is posted somewhere.
This will break in IE browsers less than version 6 as i haven’t applied any box model hacks yet. It should work in Mozilla/Firebird. I would appreciate testing on other browsers, especially on the Mac.
The image next to the navigation is random, so refresh a few times and the picture will change. Originally, I had wanted to associate a different pic with each day, but, I’ll leave that for v1.5 🙂
Inspiration came from a lot of different places. I’m sure you all can spot where i got the date/header design from. Some open source pics and a bunch of vintage postcards inspired the rest.
As you all can see, I love Century Gothic. I don’t know why… I just do. I’m probably going to get alot of critisism for this, but i designed this site for resolutions 1024×768. So if you run your monitor at less than that, prepare for some horizontal scrolling.
Like I said, I would appreciate any and all comments, praises, and flames but I prefer mostly praises 😛

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

Mark (podz)
(@podz)

19 years, 10 months ago

I like it !
You wanted suggestions … mine would be to have one column for images only. With what you have at the top, for me that’s a tad messy, so I’d move the blue box into the images col, and the search where that was. or even at the base of the links col.
But yea, I like it 🙂

davedorm
(@davedorm)

19 years, 10 months ago

It’s a bit wide. Most people still surf at 800×600. I am at 1024×768, but I force my browser at 800×600 so I am not using the entire screen for the web.
Just a thought. Other than that, I like it.

eric
(@eric)

19 years, 10 months ago

re. your date problem, have you tried WP’s the_time() function? Documented on the Wiki: http://wiki.wordpress.org/the_time
As long as you set the right time difference in the WP control panel it should work.

rayne
(@rayne)

19 years, 10 months ago

Looks great in Safari on Mac OSX. I love the menu in the top right. It’s pretty and colorful. You did a great job.

Root
(@root)

19 years, 10 months ago

In my respectful submission – if we collect statistics and then adjust our site design accordingly we are in danger of making two statistical errors (and I do not mean to sound pedantic). The first error is that we record our visitors characteristics. What we can not measure is how many people arrived with narrow viewports, were put off and never returned. They will not be in our viewer stats at all. This is also true for browser viewing statistics.
The second error we make is in believing that successful design is in someway related to what a particular sub set of readers is doing. IMHO successful design, web standards and accessibility mean we should be building for everybody. How we handle the width question is a big part of that. Just my two cents.

shadow
(@shadow)

19 years, 10 months ago

I agree with what you are saying here Root.
The trouble with any stats is that they can be too general. I have always made my sites to be viewable by all, but in this latest venture I have opted for what I believed to be a majority. Now, I do not wish to get into a debate about the pros and cons for this, but one thing I should say is that I believe a lot of people, including myself, simply do not know enough when it comes to making the ‘perfect’ design, and consequently, we go with what we know best.
I applied this principle to my current site and basically chipped away at the wp-default design until I ended up with something ‘I’ was happy with, but I am continually looking for ways to improve and adjust to make the whole thing better overall.
I hope once I learn enough I will be able to present a site which will be ‘usable’ by all and people can then focus on the content and not be distracted because of the layout issues.
My 1c worth 🙂

Thread Starter Anonymous

19 years, 10 months ago

Wow, my site sparked all this debate about browser sizes???
Thanks for all the wonderful comments. podz, I changed the site as per your suggestion and i really like it better now… THANKS!!!!!!
This discussion BTW (about wide site design) is a topic of great interest to me. Root you said above:
<quote> IMHO successful design, web standards and accessibility mean we should be building for everybody.</quote>
I totally disagree with you here. Successful web design in not building for everyone, it’s understanding your audience and building specifically for them. If we try to please everyone, then we’d never get anything done. My site is geared (or will be) to the design community. I am pretty confident that the audience viewing the site will be browsing at 1024×768 at least (my site looks even better at higher resolutions). I didn’t even consider designing for 800×600 and it gave me more freedom with the layout that I wanted.
I realize that some people don’t maximize their browsers, that’s why you’ll notice that the real content is in the left column making it accessible to those people. I honestly don’t think it’s a big deal for someone to maximize their browser to view the site as a whole, or scroll horizontally if they want to get to the “frills” of my site. Really… have we become THAT lazy?!?
The only real critisism that i can come up with in this case is that the navigation itself is on the right, so when someone loads my page with an un-maximized browser, they don’t see it. I may correct this sometime in the future, but right now, i just want to be done with the thing.
My 3c worth 🙂

Root
(@root)

19 years, 10 months ago

@ shadow. You are exempt from this. Your blog is fantastic by any standard 😉