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Minsc · 06-10-2008, 09:22 PM

Some suggestions(mostly technical):
-Your page is 2MB big and most of it is images. Get rid of most of those. 200k is a good upper limit for the total size of the page.
-Drop the goofy-looking guys in your header. They make your site look like a scam. Also, make it like 60px high and 780px wide max(which is some random number, not any exact statistic, so don't trust it too much), then center it horizontally, or just make it text.
-Get rid of every image you have in the posts. Not only do they take up space, but they make your content look as generic as the images. If you really have to have them, make them 200x150ish greyscale JPEGs.
-You could move all that stuff to the right of your blog over to the left side, and make it smaller horizontally.
-Just because you can use background-image doesn't mean you should replace every single image tag with it. Make the top header a normal image and give it an alt tag, since it's not in the background of anything. Ditto for that little RSS button. You are wasting so much effort with that. There is no reason to emulate a regular image with CSS.
-I guess you could get rid of the "the" in your URL if you really wanted to. It'll cost you $8 and you'll have to make the old one redirect.
-There are 30-some tabs on the menu bar at the top. The purpose of a menu bar is not to link to every page on your site. Make some sort of "best of" page and link to all of your happiness-related articles from there.
-After you merge the far right side of the page with the far left, get rid of that "Pages" part as it is useless. You could replace it with a "recent posts" or whatever part instead. Get rid of that neat little RSS text-link and button and add in a giant one on the top of the far-left without any piece-of-paper-with-a-plus-sign-bar over it, centered. Then drop that "Meta" bar unless it does something other than help you administrate your site; you can bookmark all of that.
-Make that header link you to the home page.
-Once you drop all of the tabs you could make two: "Best Of", and "About". You could also add an archives page like on Steve's site, and if you do, link that text on the archives block to the main archives page.

06-10-2008, 09:22 PM	#13 (permalink)
Minsc Senior Member Join Date: Nov 2006 Posts: 336	Some suggestions(mostly technical): -Your page is 2MB big and most of it is images. Get rid of most of those. 200k is a good upper limit for the total size of the page. -Drop the goofy-looking guys in your header. They make your site look like a scam. Also, make it like 60px high and 780px wide max(which is some random number, not any exact statistic, so don't trust it too much), then center it horizontally, or just make it text. -Get rid of every image you have in the posts. Not only do they take up space, but they make your content look as generic as the images. If you really have to have them, make them 200x150ish greyscale JPEGs. -You could move all that stuff to the right of your blog over to the left side, and make it smaller horizontally. -Just because you can use background-image doesn't mean you should replace every single image tag with it. Make the top header a normal image and give it an alt tag, since it's not in the background of anything. Ditto for that little RSS button. You are wasting so much effort with that. There is no reason to emulate a regular image with CSS. -I guess you could get rid of the "the" in your URL if you really wanted to. It'll cost you $8 and you'll have to make the old one redirect. -There are 30-some tabs on the menu bar at the top. The purpose of a menu bar is not to link to every page on your site. Make some sort of "best of" page and link to all of your happiness-related articles from there. -After you merge the far right side of the page with the far left, get rid of that "Pages" part as it is useless. You could replace it with a "recent posts" or whatever part instead. Get rid of that neat little RSS text-link and button and add in a giant one on the top of the far-left without any piece-of-paper-with-a-plus-sign-bar over it, centered. Then drop that "Meta" bar unless it does something other than help you administrate your site; you can bookmark all of that. -Make that header link you to the home page. -Once you drop all of the tabs you could make two: "Best Of", and "About". You could also add an archives page like on Steve's site, and if you do, link that text on the archives block to the main archives page.