The Kestrel Minority

Yea, as the title says, I have a website which I built myself about a month back, (well that's when I did most of it) so just putting that out there in case anyone would be interested.

Got a Halo 4 "review" and some thoughts on Skyfall in the blog on there.

Link: http://leonick.se

Feel free to leave some thoughts/feedback regarding the sites layout, could be useful.

Since I have some interest in layouts and cognitive sciences I'll provide some feedback. :)

First of all a question - are you using Wordpress in the background for any of it or did you code it entirely yourself? I'm asking mainly for figuring out how easy or hard it would be for you to redo things in the layout and would feel bad if I presented something that would possibly provide a huge challenge. :)

Ok, first thing I thought personally was "Yowza, that's a lot of letters! xD". While I'm not entirely illiterate and have a (partial) university background, I've also been spoiled badly by the internet and can quickly loose interest if I have to look and actually read all that text. In that sense adding a simple picture to each article or change the font(s) used on your blog may already help a lot.

A website I've found factually does the same thing as you, namely keeping a blog, but is a lot more cognitively (is that a word??? xD) interesting would be http://pimdijkstra.com/. Besides the fact that it's *ahum* my brother's webpage (and in dutch for that matter, sorry about that :P), he's been working on his blog to make it visually very tempting to look over each article presented.

He did this by placing the articles in smaller blocks so you can see more articles (less scrolling), with a smaller but also friendlier, less oppressive font, and added a picture for each title (Which also adds some color and with it adds visual calm and order to the page). Basically if my have blinked me eyes just a few times I'd already have absorbed a lot of information increasing the chance I find something potentially interesting and making me stick on his page, and he managed to do that without me feeling the website is oppressive in a way.

Anyways, perhaps his website/blog can give you some ideas for you own. If your blog has Wordpress or any similar tool working in the background, it should be fairly easy to modify and get it working to your tastes. ^^

p.s. One awesome things he's implemented in his page - try making your browser's box smaller (windowed) when viewing his blog and see what happens... Awesome eh? :P

Valenth wrote:Since I have some interest in layouts and cognitive sciences I'll provide some feedback.

Appreciated.

Valenth wrote:First of all a question - are you using Wordpress in the background for any of it or did you code it entirely yourself? I'm asking mainly for figuring out how easy or hard it would be for you to redo things in the layout and would feel bad if I presented something that would possibly provide a huge challenge.

As you could have seen with a quick visit to the about page it's not using anything like wordpress. I did run wordpress at first but I ended up just writing the whole page myself due to a couple of reasons like the fact that I didn't find a theme that both looked and worked well (and I wasn't really interested in learning how to make wordpress themes) or the fact that I like being in complete control of the code for each page. It's also fun writing all the code driving it all in the back-end

Valenth wrote:Ok, first thing I thought personally was "Yowza, that's a lot of letters! xD". While I'm not entirely illiterate and have a (partial) university background, I've also been spoiled badly by the internet and can quickly loose interest if I have to look and actually read all that text. In that sense adding a simple picture to each article or change the font(s) used on your blog may already help a lot.

A website I've found factually does the same thing as you, namely keeping a blog, but is a lot more cognitively (is that a word??? xD) interesting would be http://pimdijkstra.com/. Besides the fact that it's *ahum* my brother's webpage (and in dutch for that matter, sorry about that ), he's been working on his blog to make it visually very tempting to look over each article presented.

I've been thinking about adding a pictures to the blog yea... I'm not going to end up doing like a lot of big blogs do though where they have a picture for every single post even if it's a really short one and the image is barely related to the text...

Also have to be very careful picking pictures when you can't do them yourself, copyright and all that.

Valenth wrote:He did this by placing the articles in smaller blocks so you can see more articles (less scrolling), with a smaller but also friendlier, less oppressive font, and added a picture for each title (Which also adds some color and with it adds visual calm and order to the page). Basically if my have blinked me eyes just a few times I'd already have absorbed a lot of information increasing the chance I find something potentially interesting and making me stick on his page, and he managed to do that without me feeling the website is oppressive in a way.

It's an interesting layout, might have to sit down and experiment with something similar. Hmm.

Valenth wrote:p.s. One awesome things he's implemented in his page - try making your browser's box smaller (windowed) when viewing his blog and see what happens... Awesome eh?

Did you try making the browser smaller on my site? I don't have any boxes flying around but the site will adjust itself to any windows smaller than 935pixels.