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berjon.com (re)design

darobin on 2002-01-31T19:46:04

I've been playing with redesigning (well, as far as one can say there's a design there) berjon.com in my copious spare time (ie between 3am and 5am). There's not much content on that site right now (especially none that's accessible if you don't know the address) but I've got a few things lying around here and there that I plan to add.

Not that it's likely to be a very interesting site to anyone bar myself, but I'd appreciate comments on my first design draft if you're so inclined. It's not very original but I've lost what little design skills I had when I went full-time Perl. I'm also taking into account the constraints of making it hold together with just XHTML and CSS, no tables unless there's tabular data (and netscape can get it's long overdue entry to hell).

I already got some feedback from the AxKittens on #axkit-dahut and it's given me a few ideas. I think I've gotten so used to peer-review that I find it hard to do anything without asking for comments ;-)

Too much 'noise'.

godoy on 2002-02-01T12:45:37

I thought there's too much noise on there. The colors and the background image distracts too much, making you pay attention to them instead of the contents of the page.

The small letter of the text also helps to cause that effect.

I'm only commenting based on the PNG image that you attached to the file.

Re:Too much 'noise'.

darobin on 2002-02-01T12:52:36

Thanks for your comments! However this is not really a content site, it's meant to be a personal site with the odd piece of info, so people going there are probably already distracted ;-)

Re:Too much 'noise'.

godoy on 2002-02-01T19:52:40

Oh well... That was what I thought from your description (you said it was a personal site). But, I also thought that people would like to get something useful. At least I do... Even if it's just for the sensation of doing/reading something nice.

For the latter to be true, you must focus on the contents. The background (I liked it! Really! But what I remember the most from the small picture is the background, not the layout --- the text, I suppose, was just informative so besides having read it, I haven't paid that much attention to it) is very beautiful.

I don't know... :-) Maybe I'm too stressed out and I've not seen the fun on just having it there... I have something like that here, but that's not as elaborated as yours. I'm not a designer either... :o)

Re:Too much 'noise'.

darobin on 2002-02-01T20:27:49

Oooh, I hadn't been to your site yet, it looks very useful. I keep bitching about DocBook but I use it all the time. I'll definitely have to read your stuff.

Yes, I do intend to put a few useful things on that site, but not too many and with alternate stylesheets for printing. Those will be devoid of any pics or of anything that might distract the printer ;-)

I guess I should have said "don't read the text" as well. That's just a snapshot of the design, there's no real text. I took the text straight off the present berjon.com homepage and it's very dated text, from the time I dropped CSS::SAC in a subdir and people kept going to the index to see the rest of site. Given that I have dir listings off and that that page didn't exist it caused a fair number of redirects (Google went into a loop and start banging like mad). I just dropped it there so it's not meant to be interesting :)

But yes, mostly I'm doing this to have fun, and to play around with some content management concepts (thought not at first), so I must admit I'm not focussed on readability (especially as this will break non compliant browsers).

Thanks a lot for your feedback :-)