Perfect timing, I've just started to revisit my personal site with a completely custom theme, based on Bulma! I haven't taken it live yet, but because Netlify is wonderful, I've got a preview I can show you.
Here are a couple of sepcific's I'd love some feedback on, but any tips are greatly appreciated. It's still very much a work-in-progress, so I'm mostly just looking for general tips for better design and usability.
First impression of the homepage. I really like the tiles, making the homepage something of a collage, but can't decide if they are too cluttered or too busy. Also, I'm trying to work out the best colors for it to not be too intense, but still be interesting
Blog post layouts. A couple things I'm considering: making the card backgrounds colored subtly, maybe to look like parchment, and using a serif/typewriter font. Any suggestions for good fonts to use?
Looks great! I would definitely use caseyjbrooks.com over 5bedafbcdaeb0a2d6bd167db--caseyjbrooks.netlify.com. Netlify has super simple domain settings and free HTTPS setup!
Thank you! I've been using Netlify for a while now, and do have it set up at caseyjbrooks.com/, DNS, SSL, forms, and all! The site I linked is still in progress, in another branch of the same repo, and that nasty URL is a branch preview of it!
I really like the cards and the font sizes -- super good looking, and the colors are different but cool! I would remove the background image on the side panel, just keeps the clean theme going. I would also make "about", "blog" and "contact" bigger since you really want people to go to those pages! I would make the fonts on your about page bigger! I would show all your blog posts on a page so that someone can see all of them at once, maybe with images so that people are drawn in to read them! I love the cards though, again!
Thanks for the advice, and I'm so glad to hear you like the cards, I was really wavering on that!
I actually chose the colors trying to compliment the sidebar background, but maybe I'm just partial to it because it's one of my favorites from my gallery 😇I had originally used a solid color for the sidebar and didn't like it much, but I also didn't like the original colors at all either, so I might like it much more with a more muted palette. Lots to play around with!
And I do have blog listings, but I have not gotten around to making those look nice yet, it's just a list of links. I do link to these archive pages from the homepage tiles, but I will definitely try to make it more obvious how to view the archives.
Oh, your art work is awesome! I'm just biased against background images in general I think -- just think it usually detracts. I would maybe put the cards on a separate page then, and just have art/your name/links on the home page?
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That's really nice. I like the separation of the section with the grid as its background.
To be honest, my first impression of the homepage was the word, "Christ". It jumped out at me and I immediately wondered what that was about and scanned around the page for any mention of anything that wasn't code. I found stuff in your personal blog ("musings") but that's kind of buried. I expect you were going for the three-word-alliteration that makes a lot of catchy phrases pop out and I know that developers often throw the word "coffee" around in conversation like it's a conjunction but I feel that if you're going to put religion front and centre you could maybe devote more home page space to it?
I don't think the tiles are too cluttered. There aren't too many of them and while there's perhaps not much to distinguish between them they've got their own space and are well-named and easy to glance through.
I think your layouts are nice the way they are; there's pretty much nothing I would change and I think that changing fonts might just be tweaking something for the sake of it. I do think that using a typewriter font would make things harder to read though so I'd advise against that.
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Perfect timing, I've just started to revisit my personal site with a completely custom theme, based on Bulma! I haven't taken it live yet, but because Netlify is wonderful, I've got a preview I can show you.
caseyjbrooks.com
Here are a couple of sepcific's I'd love some feedback on, but any tips are greatly appreciated. It's still very much a work-in-progress, so I'm mostly just looking for general tips for better design and usability.
Looks great! I would definitely use caseyjbrooks.com over 5bedafbcdaeb0a2d6bd167db--caseyjbrooks.netlify.com. Netlify has super simple domain settings and free HTTPS setup!
https://app.netlify.com/sites/(site-id)/settings/domainThank you! I've been using Netlify for a while now, and do have it set up at caseyjbrooks.com/, DNS, SSL, forms, and all! The site I linked is still in progress, in another branch of the same repo, and that nasty URL is a branch preview of it!
I really like the cards and the font sizes -- super good looking, and the colors are different but cool! I would remove the background image on the side panel, just keeps the clean theme going. I would also make "about", "blog" and "contact" bigger since you really want people to go to those pages! I would make the fonts on your about page bigger! I would show all your blog posts on a page so that someone can see all of them at once, maybe with images so that people are drawn in to read them! I love the cards though, again!
Thanks for the advice, and I'm so glad to hear you like the cards, I was really wavering on that!
I actually chose the colors trying to compliment the sidebar background, but maybe I'm just partial to it because it's one of my favorites from my gallery 😇I had originally used a solid color for the sidebar and didn't like it much, but I also didn't like the original colors at all either, so I might like it much more with a more muted palette. Lots to play around with!
And I do have blog listings, but I have not gotten around to making those look nice yet, it's just a list of links. I do link to these archive pages from the homepage tiles, but I will definitely try to make it more obvious how to view the archives.
Oh, your art work is awesome! I'm just biased against background images in general I think -- just think it usually detracts. I would maybe put the cards on a separate page then, and just have art/your name/links on the home page?
That's really nice. I like the separation of the section with the grid as its background.
To be honest, my first impression of the homepage was the word, "Christ". It jumped out at me and I immediately wondered what that was about and scanned around the page for any mention of anything that wasn't code. I found stuff in your personal blog ("musings") but that's kind of buried. I expect you were going for the three-word-alliteration that makes a lot of catchy phrases pop out and I know that developers often throw the word "coffee" around in conversation like it's a conjunction but I feel that if you're going to put religion front and centre you could maybe devote more home page space to it?
I don't think the tiles are too cluttered. There aren't too many of them and while there's perhaps not much to distinguish between them they've got their own space and are well-named and easy to glance through.
I think your layouts are nice the way they are; there's pretty much nothing I would change and I think that changing fonts might just be tweaking something for the sake of it. I do think that using a typewriter font would make things harder to read though so I'd advise against that.