[web] Feedback request

Overall it looks nice. It doesn't overwhelm me at all. The color scheme is a bit bland to my taste. The design could do with a tad more color, perhaps a warmer color to contrast all that cold white and green.

The only nitpick I have is that the left column and right column don't line up horizontally at the top. In my browset (FF3, Linux) the "Recent Snippets" is higher that the "Search" on the left.

You may also want to give the title a subtitle or byline underneath it, describing in one short & sweet sentence what the site is about. Just to please first time visitors.

Thank you for the input. I'm a bit out of ideas for the colors, sadly—no matter what I add, it looks like clutter.

I've noticed the misaligned top borders. It seems to happen in Firefox 3.0 and IE but not Firefox 2.0 or Opera, and I don't really know where the strange offset in the left column could be coming from...

The byline is a great idea, I'll get my brain churning on one.

Have a go at this. Go to Color Scheme Designer 3. Select the second dial in the top-left (compliment). Below the color wheel on the right side is te RGB code. Click it and enter the green that you're using on the site (639F31). The color designer will pick other appropriate colors. A couple other hues of green and a nice contrasting purplish. At the right-bottom side choose "light page example". That doesn't look half bad :-)

Quote:

Do you consider it visually pleasing, and easy to navigate? I'm particularly afraid of presenting users with overwhelming amounts of information.

I'd say you're on the wrong track then, because that's exactly what i thought when i first saw it. It looked like a solid wall of text links. The open-air look you have now is best suited for smaller amounts of content, i think.

I'd like to see a "boxed-off" version in which each of the sections lives in a color-coded box (or at least color-separated). The white-space you currently have isn't doing it's job for a few reasons:

- if you want to keep the white/clean look without boxed sections, my eyes would prefer the margins be nice and flush. The indented content throws me off a bit. If the margins were flush, i would be easier to tell what was a cohesive section and what was not.

- i don't think there is enough whitespace between sections. that's just me, though.

So i think having a foreground/background distinction might help that a bit better.

Another thing i noticed was that your title links and your headers are conflicting. The headers are usually bigger than other bits of text. Your article links are actually bigger than the headers. Consider shrinking them or (even better) make the headers more distinct. Perhaps a solid dark bar with the text inside. That would set off the sections better. Admittedly clunkier, but easier to read and navigate.

The article link icons do NOTHING. Icons need to be very distinct or otherwise not used. What do the icons add now? Do they help me figure out what's what? Nope. Mostly just taking up space and adding a smidge of color. I'm not against icons, i just find these ones too small and nondescript (i'm assuming they are placeholders for your forthcoming masterwork ;-)

I also find the stars really distracting for some reason. Visually, they fight against what really ought to be getting the attention. If they were the same green color and a bit smaller, it would be more cohesive.

Sorry for being harsh, but i hate it when people look at my work and say "that's nice." [!]