http://sorrowind.net

My old site, well, sucked, and I never used it. Upon hearing about Textpattern, I dropped Wordpress like a bad habit and totally redid the website. The theme is a reworking of the default, and since I hated black I threw in a simple background image to finish it off. If the image is too bright (makes the text hard to read) let me know, I'll darken it some more. It looks okay on my LCDs, but that's not saying much.

Before you check the site does validate 100% XHTML 1.0 Strict, and CSS. :p

All and all it's pretty simple, but I'm curious to hear what everyone has to say about the site, and also the content (which would be Of Place and Time). Thanks.

looks good, i like that background.

I like it, it's clean and fast but still looks good.
But perhaps you should make the text not a solid white, but a light grey instead. That should make it glow a little less, thus making it easier to read.

And why don't you use lists in the navigation? With CSS you can make them look like they look now but also make the navigation stick out better on text only browsers or for screenreaders. And a navigation is a list of links anyway.

The lists is actually how the original theme had been set up.

The theme itself has some accessibility css in it just for text-based browsers and such. (The navigation automatically appears first, and there is something on the VERY top that appears to jump to navigation, or content, or searching).

I'll look into CSS'ing it, but I think at the end, it'll probably mess the text-based browsers up more than anything.

Maybe let the image fade out or darken at the left and right border, to give the site some kind of frame...

I added some border styles to give it a bit of structure, rather than doing the fading which would be quite a bit harder to do.

Thoughts?

If the background picture was of better quality, that'd probably help. Looks quite blurry, and busy, as is.

I like it a lot. But navigation should always be a list. It's part of standards.

Not sure how it could be blurry, as it's actually a very high-res image... but as far as busy, do you think that darkening it some might help it? I mean honestly I don't see the problems you're citing :/

As for the lists, yeah I'm working on it, it'll be done by the end of the night if there isn't any unforseen issues.

Edit: I believe everything that should be a list is now a list. Hooh hah, valid code!

I don't know about the dotted lines, dude. Dotted always means "temporary" for me, no idea why. Maybe try solid ones with a darker color, so that they don't stick out that much...

try to get each of the links on separate lines. for example, the "understanding anime" link actually takes two lines, which maybe be confusing (i know you have th underline rollovers, but still, kinda... doesn't feel good).

also, the "of place and time" page has diff. formatting then the other pages.

I don't have time to read the entire thread, so my apologies if it was already mentioned, but the TextPattern banner should link us to their site.

It doesn't seem to be focused properly, at least, which gioves it a rather blurry effect.

Plus, trees and websites don't mix with me for some reason.

I dont agree. It looks focused fine. And Im not quite sure what you mean by "websites and trees dont go together."

He just hates my site :downs:

Ragna: Of Place and Time has a different format cause I changed it while you were viewing the site It will be fixed shortly. Also I would be hard pressed to get the links on one line, as the site barely fits on a 800x600 window now, which means I'd have to shrink the content area.

MentatMM: Yeah I didn't notice that, but they didn't link it in their default theme either. Odd. I'll add one though.

zagibu: I didn't like solid lines at all, so it'd probably either be dotted or none. :/

I think it just has an illusion of being blurry since the levels have been adjusted.

Looks pretty good. I like it. As someone else said, maybe dotted lines aren't the best. But they're fine with me. You should close up the top though, above where it says "Welcome to Sorrowind!"

Lastly, I think the large "S" in Sorrowind is too tall and elongated. I would shrink it down almost half. And maybe try manipulating an actual S of the matching font instead of making your own. Or maybe you did, but it looks hand-made.

Oh, one more thing about the background, maybe make it taper more towards the right side of the screen? Such that it looks more slanted.

I agree with Emon about the S.

I think that the site tagline "strong wind" should be immediately under the line under Sorrowind, and that the titles 'Sections' and 'Categories should be at the same level as "Welcome to Sorrowind".

I could also really use the understanding anime thing right now, but it seems to be broken.

UA isn't broken... :/

Well what I mean is that there basically aren't any actual pages about anime. Just My-HiME and 'Understanding Tags'.

That's cause no one has written any yet