My new theme for my blog!

Thanks for the advice. I noted these and am already working on a newer theme with these problem areas fixed. Thanks

 

Thanks for the comment Sidebar will be fun to redo. RSS does look a little off (it was my first attempt to make an RSS badge )

 

Thank you everyone who replied. I will definitely work on the following:
- Sidebar size/margins
- RSS badge
- Spicing up the footer
- Adding an "About Us"

Thank you for all the replies! You guys are great!

Hmm.. I also just noticed that my sidebar is partially broken in Firefox (some of the links are unclickable)... hah.

 

i love the green your blog looks good i think i might start reading it

 

Thanks for the comment I will be adding information daily (not counting Christmas, I have family things - but I might even add a bit of a tidbit then, too).

To everyone else who has been following the blog design progress:

I changed the sidebar around a bit like suggested, hopefully it doesnt look overly big anymore. added some headers to the side (though it was a quick attempt, I might change them to make them look better in the future). Next on my list is a redo of the footer to spice it up a bit more.

 

looks interesting. i like green.

 

categories list is too close to the edge of box, note to self= always add cell padding !!!!

 

HAH! I didnt even realize it until right now, I thought I did it earlier. Thanks for pointing it out. I also increased the size of the sidebar by a bit and spaced that out a bit. Hopefully it doesnt look like a splattering of black/white/green

Thank you again for all of the comments

 

good theme !!! have u designed it on ur own ?

 

Yeah, I was fiddling around with a few themes, but I decided to try and stick with this one. It's evolved a bit since the original post.

Thanks for the good comment

 

Hello, the only thing that I don't like about your site is the font on the poll to the left at the very top of the page. Veyr hard to read.

 

I really like how your site looks. It is really nice. I do have one suggestion.

The page took a while to load on my T1 connection. The document size is about 1.2 mb. Try to re-save your presentational images to make them smaller file sizes. I'll bet you could cut down your document size by about 1/2. People will be more happy with your site if it loads faster.

If you use Photoshop, open the image, and click "Save for web". Then you can play with the options to get the smallest file size without compromising the quality. You will basically be saving the images more efficiently. Other image editors have a similar feature.

 

I like the green look, keep up the good work.

 

Thanks for the tip. It should load up quicker (mainly because the wp-cache is now turned on). It cut down the loadup time dramatically for me. If not then I will lower the overall size like suggested. Thanks for the comment

 

I noticed that in Internet Explorer. I took it down for now until I get it fixed. It seemed fine in Firefox (it wasn't blurry at all - it was rather crisp)

 

Thanks for the comments. I will sure try I keep trying to mod it every now and then to improve. Every one of the comments in this thread have been helpful towards my overall goal

Update: Modified the theme a bit again. Hope you all enjoy

Next two things I will hopefully work on:

Top Header and Footer.

Unless anyone else spots a few things they'd like to suggest.

 

I would still re-save your images to make the file sizes smaller. It is still pretty slow.

Here are some page load times for different connections:


14.4K - 748.05 seconds
28.8K - 379.62 seconds
33.6K - 326.99 seconds
56K - 200.68 seconds
ISDN 128K - 69.23 seconds
T1 1.44Mbps - 16.24 seconds

I don't think there is much you can do for your dial-up users, but I would be very concerned about those people on 128k connections. There are a lot of people surfing at that speed, and if it takes them over a minute to load your page, they probably won't be there long.

Seriously, if you use the "save for web" feature, you can get a much smaller file size, without losing the quality.

 

I sized down the images using save for web, thanks for the tip. (I never noticed that option before). New stats are (using the tool you used):

14.4K 246.49 seconds
28.8K 126.84 seconds
33.6K 109.75 seconds
56K 68.73 seconds
ISDN 128K 26.04 seconds
T1 1.44Mbps 8.84 seconds

I did a test and removed all the external links from my sidebar. My loadup times went down by half. The only problem with this is currently, I need those external links However, I will see what else I can tweak in the future to bring it down further. I might have to hire someone to clean up the mess I made with the template. lol.

 

Any other suggestions or comments? The header and footer are being worked on currently.

 

I like it. No complaints.