While working on an unrelated tool I noticed that my ancient blog site had a decent PR. So I decided to go through and add a new design with some fresh codding. http://www.tomfmason.net Any comments or suggestions are welcome.
Nice content, not really digging the design though. I really love the content just wish it caught my eye more. Good work
I have very little to no artistic talent. Unless you consider coming up with innovative ways of solving problems artistic. Anyway, my overall design goal here was to have a clean, readable, uncluttered, *standards compliant and fast loading site. Can you make some suggestions as to possible improvements that could be made? * it should validate except for the occasional crap html produced by tinymce
Depending on your platform , there are a ton of free themes out there that could look more enticing. You just have to look for one that is simple, clean yet creates more contrast between the content area and the sidebars. Also the windows wide header doesn't do it for me at all. It looks more like the back-end of a corporate support system rather then a personal blog. That's the problem with the design. If you are using Wordpress , try a theme like Thesis or Headway to spice it up a bit . If you're using some other CMS , you'll have to dig around a bit.
Nice and clean from where I'm standing . But you need to revamp the left menu and expand the logo into a banner .
I am using a CMS called Mezzanine. Which is written using the popular python framework Django. I could literally take any free website template and convert it for use with the cms in a matter of 30 minutes or so. I opted to go with something original. An original design seems better to me. I think I will just work with what I have and make improvements based on suggestions. I was trying to go for a more professional look. I work in a very professional environment and I guess the "back-end" look you mentioned could very well be a result of most of my prior work. Thanks for the review. I am actually working on the new left menu now. When you say "expand the logo into a banner" what exactly do you mean? Can you provide an example link maybe? Thanks for the comments guys
I have added a pastebin, fixed various other issues and made the comment links dofollow. Any other suggestions are welcome - design, seo, etc.
In my opnion, your blog sidebar is too short that not suit for your content area. I think you can add some widgets on it, such as random post or others. maybe good.
You can add some cool pictures related to the content over the side bars. Your site looks neat and professional otherwise. Keep up the good work.