10 things I hate about your site

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:

1. Holy navigation, Batman! You have quite a few navigation buttons.
2. Busy, busy, busy. There is a lot going on here.
3. Gray, highlighted text.
4. Too many formatting styles in a post.
5. 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.

© Griszka Niewiadomski
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This week’s resource is a cool little Dreamweaver plug-in that quickly and easily lets you create the newest web craze: the accordion effect. I came across this plug-in while pulling my hair out trying to modify open source AJAX code for this clever effect. This new design style is being tested on my old workhorse, Web-Betty.com. A note of caution…this redesign is still underway and buggy in IE 6. NOT the accordion effect, but the refusal of IE 6 to play nicely with .png transparency! (Visit Web-Betty on IE 6 at your own risk.)

From Trio Solutions:

This is a handy tool if you don’t want all sections of your webpage to be visible at the same time, for example, if you have a long page. Gives your page a professional, elaborated look.

‘d like to thank Holistic Healing for being my first victim. Below is the down-and-dirty list. Click on “Continue Reading” for explanations and recommendations.

10 things I hate about your site:

1. Too many font colors.
2. Inconsistent navigation.
3. Lack of a clear header hierarchy.
4. Odd color scheme/palette.
5. Random “floating” flowers.
6. Link treatment—link, hover and visited.
7. Yahoo! Babel Fish translator.
8. Inconsistent layout.
9. Lack of proofreading.
10. Broken links.

What is this, anyway? Well, I’ll tell you. I joined several blog communities the other day, in an attempt to gain viewers/comments/social acceptance/etc. Having three blogs already (this is my fourth—I guess I have a lot to say), I do find myself getting distracted as there are so many people out there, blogging away, on so many interesting and significant (and not so significant) topics. In my meandering, I came across a discussion entitled “10 things I hate about your blog.” Of course, this discussion had hundreds of bloggers commenting and waiting their turn for public humiliation.