What do you think?

I have to say, within the short life of this blog, I have had very nice and welcome interaction from you. Although the content is what I want people to know the site for, I feel that having a poor design only hinders my efforts in keeping my readers interested. I've been pondering a few things over the last couple of weeks and realized that I want to redesign the site and make it easier to navigate, especially since my traffic is growing. I'm thinking of enlisting E. Webscapes, whose design team seems very knowledgeable in what they do. Their work and portfolio is, well, very nice. I think they should be able to come up with something nicer than my piece meal template. Plus, they seem to be very reasonably priced.

Having said all of that, now I want to ask you a couple of simple questions:

Do you even think this site needs a facelift? Does it seem hard to navigate or read to you? Do your eyes shrivel up and fall out of your head before you have a chance to exit the site?

I know some of you might be thinking that this is unimportant, maybe even a waste of time. I try to put myself in your position, but my thoughts are always biased. So, as always, I look forward to hearing from you!

Comments

[BookMan32]

Hey,

Great site. Don't sweat the ads. The content, as you mentioned, is the thing.

In fact, they don't bother me any more than the ads in POETS & WRITERS do. Good work. My blog concerns itself with writing along with progressive politics and the environment. Feel free to stop by sometime. I'm a novice and would appreciate constructive feedback.
http://www.chroniclewest.blogspot.com/

[1ConfusedWriter]

Thanks Anders. I do agree with you there. It does have a few more advertisements as compared to a month ago. More than anything, i'm testing to see how these perform compared to others. You're right, they are there to pay for the Typepad costs..which is still a long way away ;)

More than likely, I will be pulling a couple of the Audible.com advertisements in the future if they don't pick up. May do it anyway as I don't like clutter either.

As always, thanks for your input!

[Anders]

Your layout is quite nice, but I do have one complaint -- the plethora of advertisments. I understand that the income they bring in for you probably helps you pay for this site, but it would be nice if you would cut back on the number of them.

[1ConfusedWriter]

Thanks for your input Jayne. Maybe it's because i've been staring at this design for over a month and it feels stale.

One thing I'd really like to do is modify the navigation just a tad so that users can access archive entries in some kind of menu (instead of scrolling through that entire category for information). We'll see how that turns out.

Anyway, thanks for stopping by and commenting!

[jayne d'Arcy]

Hi - I've been lurking and reading for awhile and thought I'd come out and answer your question. I think your site is beautiful, easy to read with good sized fonts, and is easy to navigate. Unless you have received a good portion of legitimate complaints, or you want a new design tailored specifically to you, I don't think you need a new design.