I’m sick of a few things on this site

1. My face. That photo is at least 3 years old and it needs to be replaced with something more current.

2. The clutter. There is entirely too much text on the front page. In the next redesign I’m going to eliminate everything but the essentials.

3. Not having anonymous comments anymore. Spam forced me to kill anonymous posting, but I need to get it working again. I know it’s a pain in the ass to log in.

4. The width. I spent a long time making sure the design would span the width of everyone’s browser, unlike most sites that are viewed at a fixed width. I’ve come to the conclusion that this was probably a dumb idea.

Anyone have any other criticisms? Disagree with any of mine?


Comments

9 responses to “I’m sick of a few things on this site”

  1. Even after this long, that picture still kinda cracks me up. I’ve always liked the one from the “AllDark” theme, where you’re looking into the guitar, but the OMI pages look a bit weird in that theme so I’ve been using “Boxed” since the OMI addiction took hold.

    Personally the width thing has never bothered me, though I do find myself scrolling sideways to read comments sometimes. I kinda like the links along the right side on the front page. I think the general feel of your design may have seeped into the direction my own site’s been taking, as I find myself subconcsiously steering toward a more picture-driven, bloggish look…

  2. The alldark theme lasted about a day before I realized all my topic images had white backgrounds.

    The next layout will probably be a two column, fixed width layout. I’ll keep the blog links on the side and probably the who’s online. I’ll probably change the Main Menu link to a drop down or something.

  3. While you’re updating, my blog is now http://blog.myspace.com/johnshaughnessy

    John

  4. Done. Sorry, I forgot to change that earlier.

  5. My suggestions: Keep the face. Fixed width. Give away huge amounts of cash to people who leave comments.

    I understand the sentiment, I get sick of my site routinely.

    Is the site an original design, a user-configured blog app or a combo of both?

  6. The design is a theme laid on top of PostNuke’s theme module. That said, there were no CSS-only themes out there so I wrote this one almost from scratch. So the answer is yes, I wrote the theme.

  7. I vote for the Chicago pic of you looking at yourself!

  8. Variety is good. Can there be a number of pictures to randomly cycle through?

    I’m not a fan of scrolling sideways.

    Having to sign in to post comments doesn’t bother me.

  9. Ok here we go..

    Your Face…. I love it.

    The Clutter…. Yes too much

    No Anonymous Posts…. I’d rather see who is posting something anyway.

    The width…. No clue

    My suggestion…. I think you could get some color to break it up a bit. It’s very white. You could Feng Shui your website.