Versteckt Sein

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I really like this layout. I don’t give a darn about planes, but that’s still a pretty, sleek image you’ve got as your header. I think it’s a nice touch that you have your site’s name along the body of the plane and your site’s initials on the… back… thingy (besides not caring about planes, I also know jack about them!). The colors are pretty, the sunshine-y bars behind the plane add a Web 2.0 feel to it, and I love how the header isn’t confined to a box shape, but instead sticks outside of the rectangular background.

My only real problem with the layout is that I think more colors could be involved. For example, instead of using more shades of blue in the sunshine rays behind the plane, you might have used a pretty yellow. The text on your plane might have been in a different color as well. You could then pick up on those colors by using them as header colors or with your links. It wouldn’t be difficult to incorporate a variety of colors, or at least two additional ones (the sunshine and the plane text), and I think it would really spice up the layout. It would help to add interest and make the overall look of the place brighter and, I think, friendlier. It’s not a particularly cold layout, especially with the hints of sunshine, but having warm colors as well as all the cool blues would be nice.

I think the order of your main navigation could be improved. Specifically, I don’t understand why you have the ‘Versteckt Sein’ link above ‘Digital Stuff.’ I personally don’t find information about the site I’m visiting to ever be more interesting than photos and art the designer has made, and I think most visitors would agree with me. If the order is for your own sake, do you really find reading about your own domain to be more enjoyable than looking at pretty photos and digital art? Also, your ‘Digital Stuff’ section looks to be a portfolio, and portfolios are meant to be viewed. You want people to see them, admire them, and possibly consider you for a job. I think moving the ‘Digital Stuff’ link up to be the second link in the main navigation would make more sense than what you have now.

In your ‘The Nerd’ section, I like how you intersperse photographs of yourself and things relevant to you with your biography. It’s nice that they alternate sides, too. With your ‘Randomocity’ section, I think there should be more padding between bullets. Right now, they all kind of run together, and it just looks daunting to read through all of them. It’s kind of like when you see paragraph after paragraph on an ‘about me’ page with nothing to break up the flow of things and add interest. Your photos take care of that with your bio, but something needs to be done in this ‘Randomocity’ area. Adding maybe 5-7 pixels of padding below each list item in that list would help. It would also be nice if you had little icons incorporated that associate with the bullet, one every few bullets or so. That would help to draw the visitor’s eye and might encourage them to read more of your bullets than they would have had there not been any images (as is the case now), since images will catch their eye. If you had a little photo of an alarm clock (try searching stock photography sites or Flickr for Creative Commons-licensed photos that you can use) in the bullet starting with “I hate alarm clocks,” for example, a visitor might see the photo and think, “Hmm, what does she have to say about clocks,” and then read your bullet.

I like that you have photos of your room in your ‘The Nerd’ section. That’s something I don’t think I’ve seen before on personal sites, and it’s interesting to read the little notes you have about various items in your room. For convenience to your users, you might incorporate information such as your email address elsewhere in your site, or at least on that page. At the moment, having to scroll through your entire ‘about me’ page to find out how to contact you is annoying, especially since I haven’t seen an email link elsewhere in the site. You could link the word ‘Melissa’ in the first paragraph of your bio to your email address, for example, and it’d be fine. If you’re worried about spam, you could try one of the various mailto encoders to encode some or all of your email address in the hex values for each letter. The browser interprets it and it shows up just fine to your users. You can also require Javascript to print out your email address, though that would exclude those without Javascript enabled.

It’s a little startling when I go to your ‘Digital Stuff’ section and the layout changes. I like the layout, but the sudden change from the blue plane layout is still a surprise. I dislike that you have a link to the same page I’m already on for ‘Web design’ because that section isn’t up yet. Make a note of it in your introductory paragraph, maybe, but I see no sense in making a self-link to a nonexistent section. I think the links to different sections (‘Photos’, ‘Graphics’) would look better laid out horizontally (in an inline list) as opposed to their current vertical orientation. That would also help shrink the height of the main page so that, at my 1024×768 resolution, there might not be a scrollbar, or at least a small one. You might also shrink your ‘Recent posts’ list such that the page doesn’t require a scrollbar at a 1024×768 resolution. I think aiming for a one-page homepage for this gallery would be good because it would make the page look more cohesive and clean.

I don’t understand the need for a thick black bar underneath the comment form area on individual post pages. It just looks chunky and unnecessary. While I like the gradient box around the comment form, I dislike it around the actual post. It seems distracting, taking my attention away from the content of the post, because the gray top of the gradient doesn’t match the black page background. You might also conserve vertical space by placing your post data (date, category) horizontally; I think that would look cleaner. Perhaps it would also help if that text were smaller and aligned right or center.

I also don’t understand why the submit button of your form says ‘Abschicken’–the rest of the site that I’ve seen has been in English, so why is this one piece of text in German? When I click on one of your sections, like Graphics, I scroll through a page of images and then see a link stating ‘Previous’, but pointing to the right, as if indicating the next section. The text itself is also confusing, since it takes me to the next page of graphics, and not to the previous page I was on. I think it would make more sense if it said ‘Older entries’ or ‘Next page’, instead of the misleading ‘Previous.’