As bloggers, we rarely ever receive this type of penetrating evaluation.

The fact you made this into a blog, in itself, is brilliant.

Keep it up.

Your friend,

Source Blogger
http://www.source-blogger.com
“Determined to make you a better blogger”
Source Blogger ´s last blog ..How I Doubled My Subscribers and Blog Income In 1 Hour?!

Some of the boxes are adverts. Guess your mind filter works just fine.

Oh dear… If even black on white is considered usability issue nowadays – I can’t help but feel helpless about that stuff. I will try my best (which is not much) with typography for new theme, hope it will turn out better. Current state is more like lack of typography.

Thanks for your input. I know whom I will bother with sneak previews of new theme if I need harsh readability evaluation.
Rarst´s last blog ..How do you drag notebook around?

I think that a little tweak here and a little tweak there, and Rarst.net will have 0 things I hate about it.

Your review was difficult for me because of the four things I listed, none of them are breaking any “rules” nor causing any problems. I knew I’d get a lot of comments on the boxes, and I was certainly right. I swear I’m not a box hater, but you have SO MANY of them. And while you do have a lot of content, I agree that it’s not too much (did I say it was too much *running up to check*). Whew, I didn’t say it was too much. My main point was that with so much content and all of the boxes looking pretty much the same, it’s hard to stop at one particular thing. I found myself overwhelmed.

I like monochromatic color schemes and don’t know that you really need to add TOO much color, but I do strongly believe that something could be done to differentiate between your content on the left and your sidebar on the right. Of course this is personal preference since as I’ve stated, your content is good, your layout is intuitive, and your site is clean and well organized.

With regards to your images, I agree that it is important to be consistent. You could, however, implement a consistent style for site screenshots and a second 1:1 pixel style for the software images. Your software images do look good, but the site screenshot (like in my example) looks unprofessional.

I look forward to visiting your blog more often, and am interested to see what changes you implement.

1.On first glance (which is a very important phase), I agree it does look like there is too much going on. However, as you also say, the great organisation of the site mitigates this over the next few seconds.

2.Yes it is boxy, but I think this is part of what helps organise the site. I think there could be less boxes. i.e. simplify the design, because I find myself mentally filtering out some of the less essential boxes. It’s partly habit because I mentally filter out adverts, and while none of the boxes are commercial adverts, on first glance you get the sense that they are.

3.The colour scheme, or lack there of, is an issue for me too. I have a similar condition to Rebecca, which requires me to sometimes wear coloured glasses to aid my reading. So completely black on white is quite harsh for me, without my coloured glasses. I wouldn’t really class this as a design flaw, but it’s an accessibility issue that effects most web sites.

4.I haven’t ever found image cropping to be an issue. Sometimes it’s better to maintain resolution and crop, sometimes it’s better to scale. It’s a case by case issue.
David´s last blog ..Battle of the Maps

Last major design changes where in January (and I had never changed theme completely) so you are bit off with time frame.

1) I never felt that amount of content is excessive. Partly I am probably immune and partly tech blogs are often extremely content-heavy. Mine is moderate in comparison.

Still I tried hard to minimize confusion some tightly-packed (and magazine especially) themes create. Most feedback on layout is positive so it more or less works for my readers.

2) I love boxes, this theme was chosen for boxes alone, boxes are awesome… Ahem.

Seriously I do like style very much. It is sharp and precise and that is important for me to easily manage things. It is easy to add or remove box, unlike complex layered themes where design can fall apart from smallest tweak.

3) I know it is somewhat bland. I gave up thinking up how to introduce colors into this theme, frankly it wasn’t make to be colorful.

I will keep monochrome style in new theme, but typography will be more bright plus background patterns and some non-box elements. I hope it will be more vivid without sacrificing too much of sharpness.

4) I picked this screenshot style deliberately. 1:1 pixel makes screenshots of software (which is bulk of content) look real and sharp.

It doesn’t work that good with site screenshots (as you picked for example) because they use more of screen space and in less standardized way. I decided there is more merit in consistent style throughout all posts, rather than trying to work out several different styles and possibly confuse readers.

Specific size also works well with slideshow in header. For now – that thing is very outdated and I will need to redo or replace it in new theme.

And I like that it looks odd. Many bloggers rely on default options of their tools and blogging engines to get screenshots up. Common result is generic and poor looking. It is best to differ from that.

@Rebecca Laffar-Smith

Hm, I thought that main headlines are emphasized enough. I did heat mapping for some time http://www.rarst.net/web/clickheat/ and it didn’t show any significant issues with navigation and browsing through main content.

And as above – new theme will be more visual and main content will be more emphazied in layout, so I hope I got your concerns covered.

Thank you for review and maybe in another year new theme will settle in and be ready for some dedicated hate.

PS only 4? phew, endless crazy tweaking pays off
Rarst´s last blog ..How do you drag notebook around?

This is the main reason why the all black and white color scheme doesn’t work–there is no contrast between different types of sections to stop your focus on one place and let you decide where to look next.

I like boxes too but I personally think they are overdone on Rarst.net. As I stated in my review, however, since the blog is so well organized and laid out, they work.

Thanks for the insightful comments Rebecca!

1. Lots of content is great, your review of WRA had the opposite, not enough content on the first page. But I think the trouble here is that the content all looks the same.

2. I LOVE clean lines and boxy does that. So the boxiness is not a bad thing. It gives balance and the boxes are well measured for width and aspect.

3. Black and white is again, clean, and corporate. For the subject it works. This 10 Things site is very dark whites and grays, it works. It doesn’t really need color so much as some visual element that says, “look at me!”

At least, that’s what I find when I view it. My eyes get sore and strained trying to see everything at once and I wouldn’t hang around for the headache it’s going to give me. Perhaps the white is too white, perhaps the lines are all too clean, perhaps there are just too many of them. But the biggest challenge for me was that everything looked the same so my vision couldn’t decide where to look first.
Rebecca Laffar-Smith – Web Designer´s last blog ..Does Our Underwear Determine Our Success?