This took me far too long. I built it using expression engine from scratch rather than using an existing template as a base, it means I learned a lot but it took much longer than it should have.

Suggestions are welcome, I may not even ignore all of them. If you're going to leave comments on the first entry please keep them sensible. Oh yeah, the first post was put together rather quickly so if you can think of a way to rewrite it so its more professional i'd be very grateful.

http://www.andrewingram.net/

I like it. Very professional.

It's rather nice. Simple, but nice. I like it.

Fixed width sucks. That could easily be scaled.

Actually, it couldn't.

I don't like the OMGCAPS under the titles for each section.

Yea thats my only complaint as well. It just seems like it stands out too much. Like the Hierarchy is backwards slightly.

I was under the impression that the statement in caps were just place-holders for future text.

Anyway, I like the site design. It's nice on the eyes.

I spy a comma splice

Why can't you?

I like it, very nice

I like those caps I think it feels a bit generic. But so it's not confusing. Probably it's just a bit plain because it's quite empty. What's this primary/secondary content thing about?

love it, always loved your designs...

What do you mean? Have I put a silly comma somewhere I shouldn't?



Because I have columns of 100px followed by a gutter of 10px going across the whole site which I don't want to break, but also having a flexible layout would require extra markup for the background image.



I've changed it to regular text in Century Gothic, it looks better but I think the main problem is that font-smoothing isn't as effective at smaller font sizes so it makes things look sharper than they otherwise would be.



Yeah, I hope to make it look more interesting with the content rather than the overall design. The Primary/Secondary links are for accessibility, they come before everything else in the source, primary takes you to the main content, secondary takes you to the sidebar.

It needs way more animated gifs, and midis in the background.:psyduck:

Nice. Looks good in my weird-*** resolution of 1280x1024.

At first (quick) glance, I only see two things I would suggest improving:

1) The "Read this article" titles for the links to the full article - perhaps they should be "Read the article 'Article Title'" so that links to different articles have different titles?

2) It's not clear that the summary of the article is just a summary - the first time I read the page, I thought the summaries were the extent of the article. Perhaps a little heading above it saying "Summary:"?

Other than those, I think it's good. Like the colour scheme, although I personally wouldn't have gone for those diagonal stripes in the background. Not surprised to see that you've gone for properly marked-up mark-up (nor that one of your first posts is a comment on correct mark-up!) Slightly disappointed that it's still a fixed-width layout though.

what?

thats standard for LCD

The green thingy above the name stands out to much.
Ruins it for me.

Consider if payback for you ruining the internet.

Incidentally, 54% of people who've viewed the site have had 1280x1024 resolution.

i love it! very trendy.

i used to do some web design when people still used tables and javascript rollovers for the design you have there. yeah, havent dabbled in web stuff for a while... damn, that was retarded back then.

it seems like nowadays the design is all defined in the css. much cleaner! did you learn this stuff from school, and is there a web resource you could maybe point me to that you found especially helpful? also, what is this "expression engine" you speak of?

as for critique... im currently on a school computer right now which uses IE6, and there is a slight break in your design (see attached pic). not sure if that was intentional or what. feel free to flame IE though, if your code is valid.

That's an IE6 bug, i'm not sure how to fix it. There was a similar issue in the main menu which I managed to address but the same fix didn't work on those links

I may take another look at it, I managed this whole darn site without using any browser hacks, i'm not letting IE6 beat me.

The design actually breaks anyway if you increase the font-size too much, well it's still perfectly usable but it's just not as pretty.

To learn things I just read things and picked up information. I didn't actually read anything in particular to learn css, I basically just googled each problem as I came across them. Producing decent css and knowing all the tricks just comes with experience. Most people start by making two column layouts which are fairly simple, thousands of tutorials out there. Sites like listamatic are good for figuring out how to do menus.

Expression Engine is a content management system aimed at blogging, it's got a nice interface and is quite powerful. Choice of which software to use comes down to personal preference though.

Oh. My LCD screen is new.

Very smooth. Great color scheme.

I believe this is the comma splice that Thrawn means:

"I’ve finally moved into my new home , come in for a cup of tea but watch out for the other rooms – i’m still decorating."

Should read:

"I've finally moved into my new home. Come in for a cup of tea, but watch out for the other 'rooms' - I'm still decorating."

Yeah, I agree with you there. Hopefully my grammar will improve with time.

Thanks for your comments everyone.

a semi-colon would have worked there, if he didnt want a period.

The coding is clean and excellent. I do not like all of the diagonal lines in the header and the menu. I think you should try something else there, but leave the background intact.

I sort of agree with Malus. I don't like the brighter diagonal lines around the "Skip to main content" and "Skip to secondary content" links. Perhaps fill that entire area in with the brighter lines (so that you have a sort of 3-part gradient left to right) and instead put the links in the cell area below? I.e. on the same line as the navigation.

Other than that, I think it's fantastic. I like your new logo a lot. Maybe though, that green leafy/butterfly/twist thing that is dotting the I could be a bit smaller.

What's the point of the Skip to Main/Secondary links, anyway?

mobile browsers, screen readers and disabled styles

Did you consider forcing it offscreen with margins? It's a neat trick that keeps the links from appearing on regular browsers (where it's generally useless), yet works perfectly on the mobile browsers, screen readers and obviously without styles? I use it on my site and it works great.

Yes, I did consider that. But then that space would be empty which looks unbalanced. All of my current ideas for design improvements require additional content which I haven't done yet.