A critique on the design of joshstaiger.org

by Josh Staiger

March 23, 2005

As I've been meeting more and more bloggers in person, I've also been becoming more and more self-conscience of the design shortcomings of my site.

Here are some of my own criticisms of joshstaiger.org (in rough order of importance). Feel free to add your own in the comments.

  1. I have no about page explaining who I am, and no prominent photo of myself (this is always the first thing I look for when I happen upon a new blog).
  2. Entries are not categorized, making it difficult for regular readers to find things they may recall reading in the past, and also difficult for new readers to get an idea of what I tend to write about.
  3. I have no site map. Thus, for instance, it would be very difficult to find the most popular service of my site, the Xanga RSS Fixer, by entering through the front page or casual deep link.
  4. A search box only appears on the front page. It should appear on every page.
  5. Visited links do not have a distinct color, flaunting users' expectations of the common web interface.
  6. The calendar on my front page is a waste of space.
  7. The recent entries links on my front page are a waste of space. Readers need only scroll down the page to see recent entries.
  8. The light grey text coloring used in different portions of the site (such as "Posted by") does not have enough contrast with the white background.
  9. Permanent links for entries are currently represented using the time the entry was posted. These should instead be explicitly say "Permanent Link"
  10. The light blue that I'm using for links could be a bit darker to contrast better with a white background as well.
  11. My temporal archive list is getting somewhat long and ungainly. This could be consolidated on a separate page perhaps.
  12. It is not obvious to the casual user what my XML syndication feeds are supposed to be. It would be helpful to take a page from Blogger's book and apply a special stylesheet to feeds that says something to the effect of "This is an Atom formatted XML site feed. It is intended to be viewed in a Newsreader or syndicated to another site.".
  13. My site is not fully accessible.
  14. My photo.net snipits use html that does not validate

I just wanted to say publically that I am very much aware of these flaws. I hope to fix them soon, and will be documenting some of the fixes as I implement them.

UPDATE:

I have created a snapshot of this site's front page, circa March 2005:

/snapshot/march2005/