Portfolio/blog Critique

[Jerm993]

Hey guys, I have recently redesigned my portfolio for some extra practice and i think that it has turned out quite nicely. If you all could take the time to look it over, tell me what you think, point out issues, and anything else you can think of let me know. On my computer at least i have been having troubles with firefox and my footer, every few refreshes one of my boxes that i used( Idea stole from Chris… sorta ) decides it doesn’t want a limited hight and displays everything in it, fixes?
http://www.jeremycarlsten.com

Thanks,
The name above^^

[clokey2k]

It also does some REALLY funky positioning if you resize your browser and paragraphs on your post pages just roll on to the next, making it difficult to read.

[TT_Mark]

Responsive Web Design is the new ‘buzz phrase’ You should be looking to take advantage of all the available screen space with your design. It is far too crammed together for my liking.

Also, you have some pretty horrific positioning. There’s a negative margin on column two and a positive maragin on column one. They should both be the same for them to line up, which means you have some dodgy CSS somewhere else.

[Jerm993]

Thanks Guys,
other than the facebook icon that i mis-aligned on purpose, i don’t see what is so un-aligned. The navbar and header are aligned, the top of the sidebar and content are aligned, then the tops of things in the footer should be aligned, i did say i was having troubles with the footer though. As for the downsizing, how far did you go? I think everything is fine down to 1024px, because of the type of people i would get reading my blog, webdesigners, developers, or businesspeople, i figured that 800×600 wasn’t necessary. As for the negative margins I don’t know why they were so offset, i’m looking into it still, this is a temp fix. And I’m also looking into some fluid text, but being the noob that i am, I aways have used fixed width elements as they convert from photoshop nicely. The redundency in the Rss is just me messing around with the widgets, I’ll mostlikely remove the rss link in the sidebar, wasn’t sure if I could put images in text boxes, anchorlinks, etc.

Thanks for reviewing,

Jeremy Carlsten

[Jerm993]

Update:

Alright, Now i see what you guys were talking about. I looked at everything re-aligned it, changed the search size, made the site more fluid to deter whitespace, although i still can’t figure out the margin issue i’m having on the homepage. Tell me what you think of the improvements.

http://www.Jeremycarlsten.com

Thanks again,
Jeremy C.

[Johnnyb]

Maybe on the home page you could put a large image of your latest work under the blog posts. There seems to be a ton if white space there and it looks empty. The image of you poking up your head is cool, I like that idea!

[Jerm993]

Yeah i was working on that image in photoshop and it became the inspiration for the site , I did plan on having an image of the current project on the homepage somewhere, just havn’t figured out where yet, and most of the time the blog posts will be bigger… i think.

[SaraMarie]

Hmm, I’d lose the fancy fonts on all but the menu bar. There’s no anti-aliasing on them since you’re using @font-face, so they look jagged. If you are on Mac they might look better… I’ve heard Macs have better font anti-aliasing. But on my Vista laptop in Chrome, the fonts look jagged. If you have to use that font in all those places, use Cufon. It will soften them automatically.

I wouldn’t use a serif font with those fancy fonts. Too much fancy and clashing. Use sans-serif and also set a higher line-height for your text in CSS. You know, there’s a lot of typography geeks around here… I think Coyier might be one of them. Look around for articles on that because it’s really helpful for getting that “professional polish.” That and spacing… seriously, design on a grid and get anal about it. *lol* Spacing and fonts are the top 2 things I see newbs get wrong, time and again. Learn to get those right and you’ll have work that looks 10 times better, I swear.

[Jerm993]

haha, yes I’ll admit anytime that I’m not really a font nerd, I’m actually using Google font library to insert the ‘fancy text (Lobster).’ Aside from maybe the tops of the B’s and P’s I don’t really see the jagginess (< apparently not a word ^^) you're referring to. I will also admit that I haven't fine-tuned the fonts on the site yet, for instance, in IE it falls back to a very blocky type I have still got to fix that. I will see if I can't find a font that doesn't 'clash' with the lobster font. Also, I noticed that I needed to increase my line hight in places because some of the tops are getting cut off, good eye I didn't notice it for a week or two after inserting the content lol. Lastly, thanks for taking the time to look over the site, I'll see if i can't find some good type articles and spend a little more time on that in the future Vs. my sweet hover states ( I think i might be a :hover nerd.... ). Thanks again,
Jeremy C.

[SaraMarie]

*sigh* I don’t have an excuse to make up words even after spending 10 hrs coding stuff and dealing with an obnoxious client yesterday? You kids.

I had another thought, that maybe you could use more graphic design practice. When I started updating my skills a few years ago, I did it with tutorials like these:
PSD Tuts+ Interface Tutorials. Scroll down and find the ones about web design and do some of them.

[Jerm993]

Well I think i was going for more of a simplistic looking site, But yeah I’ve spent some time on psdtuts before, great site.

[renejr818]

Looks pretty nice. A small change I would do would be re-ordering the navigation. Personally i believe it should be home, about, portfolio, contact, blog. I think the change would benefit the user as they would need the more important information first. Another change I would make is in your post. The formatting looks far too cramped and uneasy on the eyes try using more line breaks or paragraphs.

[Jerm993]

I’ve been having troubles getting wordpress to add in breaks in the post, i can wrap it in paragraphs and nothing happens, and i could even add several break tags but still nothing has happened, hate it when stuff doesn’t work. :

[Author]

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