Hey Craig. I’ve made some changes (hopefully improvements!) to the website:
Only the home page is working at the moment. I will get the other pages working soon, hopefully today.
Please do let me know (in no uncertain terms!) what you think of the new design. I’ve gone “mobile first”, so it should look respectable on your smart phone.
Visually, this is good. Colors, fonts, layout in general look sharp. The only thing that jumps out at me is that the entire first screen is filler. Huge banner (which looks good), huge logo (which looks good), but have to scroll to get to any content. Again, not a designer, so I don’t have any “do this” but I feel like those elements aren’t doing anything you couldn’t do in far less space.
Ditto mobile. Looks great, but it’s a lot of fluff.
Maybe go out and look at what other websites you like do? If this is what you want, well, don’t listen to a distributed systems guy when it comes to UX. :)
Thanks! I’m not really a UX person either, but my thinking RE the “fluff” is that generally I can expect very low levels of attention from readers and I want to get my most important messages across as quickly and clearly as possible.
In this case that means including the picture of my lab in the top of the page. This is the old “a picture tells a thousand words”. If you see that picture of my lab you are likely to “get” what my video blog is about pretty much immediately.
Ditto the icon/heading/comment triumvirate at the top of the page below the picture of the lab. This form of content and branding is consistent across every page on the site. The icon is an in-joke (the Hacker’s Emblem) and the heading/comment explain in very few words what the page/site is about.
So as long as you’re happy with the colors, fonts, and layout, I think I’m gonna keep the “fluff” in. But thanks very much for your input, you have been instrumental in the improvements to the design and I very much appreciate it!