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I could use some advice on usability and design on my blog: Storied Mind
This is the Catalyst theme I added to the site about 3 months ago. It's gotten a good response, and traffic has doubled. But I'd like a technical perspective on how well you think it works and improvements I could make, especially on design from a usability perspective.
Thanks for your help.
John
I think it is already very beautiful and practical as it is.
Hey John,
I think it looks great, very well done.
Only 3 small things I notice:
1 White hover color for lower navbar is not that great with light background. If site has a bug this is it :)
2. Lots of content and clicking around, that is the idea with a website but have you considered breadcrumbs? Or they dont work with the post associator plugin?
3. Vertical menu is not identical on all pages, like here http://www.storiedmind.com/choices-i...cal-treatment/ on most pages it is set to open on hover. I actually thought it was broken because I had hovered/opened a few others before that one. Just a setting in widget.
This can be ignored:
There is one little detail about the vertical menu plugin. It loads the same skin once for each instance, so 6-7 times. Same file so it will be cached and also not a bug because you might want a different skin for each menu. Dev cannot know. If you cant sleep at night because of this big discovery it can be fixed. You need to select no skin for each widget with menu. Then copy all content of grey skin in to Catalyst Custom CSS. BUT you cant copy directly from greyskin file. Will not work as it is not a normal CSS file. You MUST go to their website and copy the clean template they show in FAQ. That you paste in to Custom CSS - and now you start to fill out each element with data from grey skin. And you most likely have to give full path to image files.
Easy enough for you if you build site your self but if ? just forget about it. Very close to a non issue but I have to say it now I noticed :)
Thank you, costafong - I've had a hard time learning how to get the design and practicality at the same time.
Thank you, justme -
Your opinion means a lot to me.
John
Hi, bambo -
Thanks for these excellent comments.
You're right about the white hover on the lower nav - never paid much attention to that. Not my highest priority but one I definitely want to get right.
On breadcrumbs, I ran into the problem of their default position at the top of page content. I use a lot of widgets above content and so the breadcrumbs appeared in awkward places. I just took them out but lately have learned more about why I should use them. I'll ask in another thread about the positioning problem I ran into. I didn't really look much for an answer.
Good catch on the accordion menu inconsistency. I went to the widgets and put them all on hover to open - some were on click. I had noticed the problem and wondered why they weren't all working but hadn't gotten around to checking the most obvious thing.
You have a great eye - thanks for being so thorough!
John
Really impressive ....
would take you idea in note for creating a new catalyst theme in future .....
:)
Actually I dont have good eyes for this. If I looked or used your site for some hours or just on a regular basis I would go blind fast. Most do, may be also why you say "never paid much attention..." :) But easy to jump in and point fingers based on first impression. You cant pretend to receive first impression input if you tried so good to ask others to snoop around.