First Serious Website Critique

J

jstep

New Member
Hey everyone, I just joined this forum and figured I would post up my first serious site for critique. The site is a political blog for a journalist in San Antonio, Tx. He wanted a simple blog for now but we hope to have it become a serious news source over time, and thus the design would evolve with it as content became more plentiful. The site just went live a little over a week ago so its fairly new.

Anyway, its the first serious site I've done and I'm a bit concerned about the design, I primarily consider myself a back-end developer and I dont think I have such an eye for design and interface.

The URL is www.thefbm.com

I would appreciate any criticism as to how I can better the design.

Also, I feel I should make some sort of disclaimer as the content posted has the potential to be somewhat controversial...

I am not the author of this site, I do not provide or have anything to do with content posted on this site, I am purely the developer. I do not necessarily hold or maintain any of the author's views, beliefs, claims, etc...

Thanks again for taking a look at my work.
 
J

jstep

New Member
thanks for the feedback guys. so you think it's a pretty solid design overall? I'm about to tackle increasing the functionality on the backend to support tags an approval system for articles and fixing some issues with the automatic publishing functions. so I wanted to get any design issues out of the way. thanks again.
 
jcross

jcross

New Member
crit

The layout is solid. I feel like something is missing in the upper right of the page; too much white space. Maybe you can do a wicked rss image coming from behind the main nav bar?

The lighter gray bar with "front page" in it is unnecessary. This area can be a bit cleaner by making that gray bar about 1/4 the thickness it is and used as a stroke line under the darker gray bar above, removing the text in it altogether. You can use page specific styling to indicate which page a viewer is on. (making that page's link in the main nav a different color, maybe)

The links in the archives section clash together. Perhaps some bullet image or line-height could be used to separate these topics.

I also think lightening up your <p> text color makes a huge difference. I tried #7d7d7d and it gives the overall page a nicer feel.

I would also use a different text color for the "posted by" and date areas to seperate them from paragraph content.

The site is so close to validating. You can either remove the target="new" tag on line 56, or change your doctype to transitional to get this to validate.

just some thoughts
 
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J

jstep

New Member
i will look into some of the changes you talked about, but i just checked it again and the site does validate.
 
3dmagicaldesign

3dmagicaldesign

New Member
Hi:

What about adding some Content that fills the white spaces on the top right corner? it has a very clean and serious design.
 
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