Ok, your turn...

Usually I'm the one ripping people new holes for their websites -- but I've just reskinned my site yet again, updated it's responsive layout, and in a fit of laziness slapped disqus on it for now...

http://www.deathshadow.com

Lemme have it, I can take it. If I couldn't, I'd have no business dishing it out.

The browns are based on the case colours of a Commodore 64, since it is a retrocomputing themed site. Originally I had a wood texture like the C64 was sitting on a desk, but went for the copper-ish orange peel as it was too busy and too dark. In general the darker the outer background the brighter the content looks (optical illusion) which is why I went much brighter with that. Amusingly I've gotten a few comments about it being "too dark" compared to the garishly bright blue I went with as a joke before -- when "by the numbers" this page is in fact BRIGHTER... and who says perception is disconnected from reality?

Also, the "...continued" text, should I make that a link in addition to the "comment" link? Seems silly to have three separate links at the same time to the same URI, but from a usability standpoint well...

Any and all suggestions welcome, even if I plan on ignoring most of them.

Oh and the first person to mention HTML 5 or jQuery is getting my boot so far up their ass they'll be flossing with my laces for a week.

 

Loads fast, and I'm sure your code is tip top, I will say a few things on the UX though.

The main problem from my eyes is that everything looks crammed together. I feel like everything needs more breathing room. All the navigation links to different pages in the main content area don't stand out enough. Navigating your website doesn't feel instinctual. I really have to look for that link to the comments, or that link to older posts. This is something i feel definitely could use some improvement.

Everything is very bold. Very strong drop shadows, gradients, borders, patterns, etc. I much prefer subtle everything, that's just my taste though.

 

I was kind-of expecting that reaction just because on 99.99% of websites I visit, everything is so spread out you can't fit enough content on the screen to read more than a paragraph without scrolling. (see your sitechop site where between the massively oversized fonts and massive pointless blue banner thing, at anything less than 1440 wide the only thing on the screen of value is HALF the first actual post).

My layout has a good solid 1EM around elements, 1.5em between the blog post borders and a 1.5em line-height. I "spread it out" much more there won't be any content on the screen at anything less than 1440 wide. I wouldn't ever even THINK of making the padding/margins bigger than that for fear of pissing off users who would go "Where's the beef?" like a little old lady from the 1980's Wendy's commercial.

I think that's probably also a matter of taste. I prefer the screen filled with content, NOT whitespace. I know a lot of people seem to prefer no more than a paragraph on the screen for some bizarre "TLDR" reason... and you know what I think about the TLDR mouth-breathers.

Interesting since I would have thought the use of underlines would make them stand out -- though with so many people pissing away accessibility by NOT making the links underlined have we reached the point where you HAVE to use a garish mis-matched color? That would be kind-of funny. I'm gonna swap the links to black or red instead of brown so they stand out from the flow text more -- was hoping that underscore alone would be sufficient, apparently not.

I'm a "fist in the face" kind of guy... But you all know that

Actually, every time I "toned it down" I thought it looked like ass no matter what color scheme I tried. It all blurs together without it.

Though honestly, I'm starting to be tempted to gut it down to the default HTML colors and to hell with "themes". I think I'm reading too much of Jakob Neilsen's stuff.

 

Hey hey hey, don't be getting personal and dragging my website into this, this threads about deathshadow.com. Three things I feel are off.

I think those two colors should be swapped.


Do something with this, it's an important link. Make it bold or put a background or something on it, just anything to make it stand out more.


This looks like a link, and the colors pretty random

 

Well DeathShadow helped me with my site a few years back, I remember when you told me to start again on a site I developed but I did appreciate the honesty...anyway here's my points:
When I resize the page to make it smaller, the "Home" nav has a curve on the end. But none of the other nav boxes have that curve, it annoys me a bit.

Also when I resize it smaller, the Contact Us (BTW - is there an "Us" in this site if it's just written by one guy) is missing. So does it mean that people on mobiles or smaller screens don't have the right to contact you?

The colour background looks like a truck ran over a turd and then you chose it as your wallpaper whilst the "Chocolatey browns" remind me of the aforementioned subject too.

The "By Jason Knight" does look like a link...but wait, if your site is designed by Jason (M) Knight in the About Me part on the right, surely you don't need the "By Jason Knight" at the end of each post. Is is Jason M Knight and Jason Knight two different people?

Finally the photo of you might need updating, looks like it was taken in the 70's/80's - unless that fits in with the C64 theme of the site.

Other than that, it's great and enjoy my crit!