I love feedback
Thursday, October 13, 2005 at 11:48AM by Charlie O'Donnell I participate in a listserv for my high school's alumni. Today, someone asked for some career advice and I replied with a note.
Not long after I got this e-mail.
Its so unbelievably obnoxious... I love every word of it!
"hey, thanks for helping tim out, the dude needs it... i keep forgetting to mention that your blog layout is bizarrely out of sync with your apparent tech-savvy. that thing looks like an aol member homepage circa 1997. when i look at something like that i kind of expect the writer to be either barely computer-literate or barely
literate period, which makes for some weird cognitive dissonance given your breezy and confident blogspeak. maybe you know this already but don't have the time/money to get it fixed. it might be worth putting just a little time into. one really important thing is making it more readable--the content just doesn't have enough space."
And you know what? He's totally right. My blog layout is for suck.
Here's my issue: I need/want all this playspace on the side for blogrolls, tags, counters, etc. Now, Pete gives about half of Mashable to playspace and his stuff is readable.
Is it the black? Can there be no readability with these colors? Am I destined to succumb to Ajaxian whitespace?
I think I can still get away with black and perhaps the fix is simpler than that. I have a feeling that if someone could just play around with the actual posting column, break the grey up into rounded ajax looking boxes (one for each post), and fix my titles and footers, it would go a long way.
I don't have the time to do that at all. If anyone wants to play with my template, I'll e-mail it to them and give them a shot at it, or they can just view the source. I'm debating whether I care enough about it to pay someone to do it. Maybe I'll take them out to lunch for their trouble.
Reader Comments (4)
Okay, I don't think the black works. I don't think you can get away with it. I also think the image layout is the big distracting element. There's just something that bothers the eye with the non-uniform layout of the graphics to the left... and the header image, well, we're not all designers i guess :)
Maybe use the images to break up some of the content on the left instead of stacking them up all together in one glob.
Oh and by the way, previewing comment posts doesn't work because of the black background. Pink, it's the new black.
I find it funny that you should hold up Mashable as an example of good design! I really need to clean up my layout, but I haven't had time yet.
On the black, I agree with the last commenter - white is ideal for a background, but a light shade is just as good. At the very least, you should have black text on a white background - it just looks more modern. Most of all, keep it simple!
It's all true: Angelfire and Geocities ruined black backgrounds forever for almost everything except maybe Flash content. The End. It's not your fault!
The other opinion I have is the real estate split. I honestly hate the 50/50, because I don't consider the stuff to the left nearly as important as your posts. Blah Blah, counters, blogrolls, etc etc. Everyone has them in spades. We're here first and foremost to read what you've posted and maybe contribute. If we have a hankering to seek out the other stuff, we'll find it just fine if it's only on 25% of the page.
I just went through a *major* pruning of my feeds, and you made the cut. It sure wasn't because of what's on the left!