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If I’m going to start doing this reviewing thing again, who says I have to start at the bottom? Jemjabella is a lovely site, but I want to show that even great sites have flaws for some visitors, not in small part due to the differences between the site designer and her audience. What makes sense to the designer can be confusing for her visitors because they think differently, the visitors don’t understand the designer’s big idea, or because they don’t have a full understanding of how the site fits together.

The first thing that pops out at me with the site is the header, which is logical because you want to introduce your site to your audience before anything else. However, the header statement, “Ultimately better than you,” doesn’t leave me as a visitor feeling very welcome or appreciated. Catty humor can serve a purpose later on in your site when your visitors already feel comfortable there. If you insert it in the middle of your ‘about me’ page, for example, then the user will most likely come across it after having read a few paragraphs about you. They’ve begun to get a feel for you, and hopefully if you’re the type to use such humor in the first place, they’ve picked up that you have a sense of humor and that you’re not just a bitch. Having a message like that as the headline for your whole site doesn’t sit well with me. It puts me off a bit, and I have to think others will feel the same way.

The look of the header text also seems incongruous with the rest of the design, which is smooth. The header text seems almost as if it’s aliased, particularly the smaller ‘Ultimately better than you’ message. There’s a mixture of serif and sans-serif fonts throughout the headers on the site, but I notice the headers closest in size with that of the logo text are those of your entry titles. The entry titles are in a sans-serif while the logo uses a serif font, then for the smaller sidebar headers you use serif again. Using a sans-serif font in the logo would have made it look smoother if only because all the little serifs wouldn’t be there looking slightly aliased as well. To add interest to the logo, you might also have made the ‘Ultimately…’ message sans-serif, since it’s the smaller text, and the site title serif, since it’s the larger of the two. This would also have helped with the aliased look since it’s the smaller text in the logo that looks the worst in that respect.

The gradient in the top-most red part of your design is nice and adds some depth to the area. I think you could have successfully pulled off similar gradients elsewhere in the design. The logo, at least the ‘Jemjabella’ part, would benefit the most from a gradient. Its current green to a lighter green, vertically, would look nice because it would complement the same green-to-light-green gradient at the start of the content section.

Your divider image is cute and fits in nicely with the sarcastic humor displayed in your logo by saying ‘Divider’, but I think the text is too small. I think you could keep it that small if you changed it to a sans-serif font.

The link hovers in the main column are nice and sufficiently different from the unvisited and visited link colors. However, in the sidebar, the hover color doesn’t stand out as much. I notice the text color in your main column is slightly darker than that in your sidebar, and I think if you carried that through with your link colors as well, the sidebar link hover color would contrast sufficiently. The lack of contrast is especially noticeable in hovering on the green links in the sidebar.

In your ‘Articles’ section, I find it counterintuitive to have the field label ‘Topic Suggestion’ to the right of the input field. It’s as if you’re asking the visitor to enter some data, and then find out what they were to have entered. Upon seeing it, I wondered if it might be a link to something related to the field that just happened to be a different color. Also in this section, on its index, I think it’s unnecessary to list the articles again in the sidebar when they’re available in the main column. Having such links show up when on an article’s page would make sense and be a convenience to the user; as it is now, I think it’s just a source of confusion.

I can understand having a monospace font within form fields so that a user can more easily tell what has been entered, but I don’t think it’s necessary for buttons, since the user can’t enter any data into them. I think to go along with the rest of your layout, you should change buttons and select fields as well, if you have any, to the regular sans-serif font you’re using elsewhere.

I can’t say much about the rest of your content because I think it’s done well. :)