10 things: Leading from the Heart
04. Sep, 2008 
5 Comments
The blogosphere, for all of it’s bloggers, can be a small world. Our next site review comes via a theme I chose to use for one of my other blogs, The Web-Betty Blog. There were quite a few comments regarding the Unstandard theme and how to modify it. A few of these comments came from Tracy Rosen. She provided some good info that really helped me modify the theme to my own liking.
That said, I’m going to find it difficult to provide an unbiased review as she has been oh so helpful to me. Since I’ve been asked, however, this is my way of returning the favor.
10 5 things I hate about your site:
- Holy navigation, Batman! You have quite a few navigation buttons.
- Busy, busy, busy. There is a lot going on here.
- Gray, highlighted text.
- Too many formatting styles in a post.
- Overall layout—are you making the most of your blog real estate?
Don’t be mislead. While there are only five items listed, they cover a multitude of sins.
Details
Here are the full results.
10 5 things I hate about your site:
- Holy navigation, Batman! You have quite a few navigation buttons. There are so many things to click on, I don’t know where to go, which means I probably won’t go anywhere. I don’t know if you keep stats or track your page clicks, but I’m guessing 80% of these navigation buttons are never clicked on. (Please correct me if I am wrong
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What does this mean? It means you have too many buttons at the top of your blog. After some investigation, I see that these are your categories. There is nothing, however, to let visitors know this. I know the point of the Unstandard them is be, well, unstandard. Blog readers, however, both seasoned and noobs, do expect certain elements to be consistent. I recommend removing the bottom row of buttons and incorporating them in a different manner. I think a nice addition to your blog would be a “sidebar” at the bottom of the blog, before the footer. This would be a great place to move your archive and category buttons.
- Busy, busy, busy. There is a lot going on here. As pointed out in #1, I just don’t know where to go. There are so many buttons, links, pages, etc., I’m feeling a little overwhelmed. Can you imagine how someone not so familiar with the webiverse or the blogosphere would feel when presented with all of this information at once?
What does this mean? Reduce, reuse, recycle. Think about what’s most important here, and reduce the amount of “stuff” in your sidebar (this is where a bottom “sidebar” would come in really handy). Once you’ve determined what’s most important, reuse the stuff you’ve reduced—somewhere else. Recycle the rest.
- Gray, highlighted text. I see this gray, highlighted text throughout your posts and I’m trying to determine what it means. One of my biggest design “rules” (for lack of a better term) is consistency in formatting. If you’re going to format text using color, background color, underlines, bold, etc., make a rule and stick to it. For example, 10 things uses a specific color and style for the “What does this mean?” section in reviews. A different color and formatting is used for quotes from other sites in my TOW or ROW. These don’t change from post-to-post or page-to-page. This way, my readers get comfortable with the content and how it’s laid out.
What does this mean? Decide what exactly the gray, highlighted text is for. Captions? Extra special information? Trackbacks to 10 things?
Whatever it is, choose one and be consistent. - Too many formatting styles in a post. This goes hand-in-hand with #3. Your AI page has:
- Text formatted like this.
- Text formatted like this.
- Text formatted like this.
- Text formatted like this.
- Text formatted like this.
Cue the circus music…it’s a calliope of color!
What does this mean? Re-read #3. Then decide what really needs to be stand out text and what doesn’t.
- Overall layout—are you making the most of your blog real estate? Funny how design elements intertwine. This goes along with #2, #3, and #4. Are the really important elements of your blog most prominently displayed? Maybe. Could you display things a little cleaner? Yes. Could all of the elements of your blog be more organized? Yes.
What does this mean? Take a step back and re-evaluate. What is really important and needs to stand out? Is everything special? Like Syndrome said in The Incredibles, “I’ll sell my inventions so that everyone can have powers. Everyone can be super! And when everyone is super—no one will be.”
Moral of the story: when you try to make everything in your post stand out, nothing does.
That wasn’t so bad, was it? There are also some really cool things on your blog.
Things to Keep:
First of all, content is king. Without good content, what’s the point? Your blog rocks in this area. I find your posts interesting, and I don’t even teach. I will continue to be a visitor.
Second, I love the plug-ins page and have already opened several of the plug-in links in new tabs to research for my own blogs. (For anyone else reading this and interested in good blog plug-ins, check it out.)
Third, thank you for using spell check! While I have not scoured through every page on your blog, I have been to quite a few places and I have yet to see a typo, or any grammatical no-nos.
All in all, I think this is a great blog and I look forward to seeing where you go with it in the future.
I’ve read through this quickly and thank you for the feedback – I really appreciate it. Much of what you have pointed out rings very true to me and are things I am already starting to try to address here –> test.tracyrosen.com (very much a work in progress
)
Part of the formatting issues have to do with the fact that I have imported some of the content from older themes I’ve used. I definitely plan on taking this feedback into account as I continue to develop this blog.
Tracy
Wow, that was fast! I was just getting ready to notify you that I had completed my review. I’m surprised you’re not updating the blog right now with your first day of school behind you.
I took at look at test.tracyrosen.com–nice work! As much as I love the Unstandard theme, I think you’re definitely headed in the right direction with this new look. The header and top navigation is much cleaner, and the overall layout is a lot less cluttered.
I’d love to see how things progress–please keep me posted. And please keep coming back…I’m posting resources and interesting sites every week!
Hi, This morning I decided that I wasn’t ready to give up on the Unstandard and made a few changes. Not sure how I feel about them yet and I still have a few more things to do but it feels better than before
Thanks again for your feedback and keep it coming!
Tracy
leadingfromtheheart.org
Hi Tracy,
I think what you have done has greatly improved the readability and overall look of your blog. Great job! It’s not cluttered anymore, and your navigation is not competing with itself.
You still have a good number of posts showing–changing the format to remove the secondary image format and have only lead images was an excellent choice (one that I wouldn’t have thought of, BTW.
)
I also like the rollover effect on your navigation buttons (I don’t recall them changing this way before) I’m glad glad to NOT see any gray highlighted text.
Nice work…I can’t wait to see what else you do (and how your class goes!)
Hi there
The plugins page was actually created with a plugin. I saw it on another blog and thought it was a great idea to share with others. Here is the link for the plugin:
http://lesterchan.net/portfolio/programming/php/
Also, I gleaned the idea to change the format to only lead images from Michael Hall over at galactica-science.com http://lesterchan.net/portfolio/programming/php/
I love that you asked me to clean up my sidebar. At the same time I really like all of the little images that I had there. By moving them to the bottom my site is able to breathe a bit better I think!
Thanks again for the feedback. What I have left to do is play with the formatting on the individual posts and pages…yeesh. Like I said, some pages/posts came from older sites where I had no control over the css (edublogs, wordpress.com) so whenever I wanted to change the format I did it manually. Each time I changed theme I think the older posts retained old formatting and adopted the new formatting of each theme. What a nightmare!
Tracy
ps – my latest post talks about my first few days with my class. It’s going to be quite the year!