Looking for feedback on my newly started blog

Hi Pankaj,

I liked the template which you have created, I believe you have done it on your own or was it available under blogger?

Few Suggestions for your blog:

1.  There is a slight maroon border only at top, that appears a bit distracting.

2. Would be more appealing if you use differnt formatting (font color, background color etc) for the menu at top (Home, About..). 

3. In the menu at top Advrtise link is not working

4. There seems to be major problem while posting a comment on your blog which is not allowing to post any comments. I tried posting a comment below one of your posts. I was asked to complete the word verification (captcha) where I observed:-the text box to enter the verification text is not available/visible

-at times even word verification image shown is partyl hidden.

I am using Google Chrome browser.

Also I have done most of the changes suggested by you for my blog. (Except getting rid of sidebar on right side). Please have a 2nd look on it :)

Lets help each other out :)

Cheers!

Hey thank you for checking out my blog..

I'll try to incorporate all the changes you've suggested..and extra thanks for that comment thing!

Hi Pankaj, Your blog is ok but I feel you could change the look of the blog skin with some sober colour and font selection. I, somehow, cannot see "RED" colour in fonts . Your Title Banner is not impressive. Just to give you an example please visit this blog, which is similar to yours, http://www.digisecrets.com/ and see what I mean. Now, coming to the content, it is so very useful and informative. I was looking for guidance on CSS and am grateful for your references! carryon with the good work and god bless.

Saraswathan

Thank you for your feedback Saraswathan and I'm glad that you liked the content. A lot more useful content is on its way.

About the design, I think almost every website out there is using the color blue and its shades and I'm already a regular reader of Digisecrets but I want to set myself apart from the crowd so I've used red as my theme color. But I'll definitely work on my header.

I checked out your blog - My Musings its really good.

Pankaj, I really do like your blog layout, I was quite impressed when I opened it. For me, a nice clean layout is the most important step when judging whether I want to read a website. You've used a clear white space, your content is nicely segregated with relavent images and it honestly looks quite nice. Yes, it does need some jazzing up but kudos on getting the foundations right - that's the most important part.

How did you get that format on blogger? Did you use your own coding or was it something available in Blogger's dynamic view? I'm really keen on using a similar fomat on my blog

I think layout-wise a new header would make a great addition to your blog and you're right in wanting to stand-out colour wise if as you say all the other colour blogs are blue. Red is fine if that's the way you want to go. If you want alternatives, some colours associated with technology are green, silver, white and chrome. 

Content-wise, I'm no techno genius but I think you know what you're talking about. I've personally always thought stumbleupon was the onr of the greatest things on the internet but I never knew that there were SO many social bookmarking sites. I've just begun making my way down your list :) One small recommendation - when recommending a site, it would be good if you could also have a link on your page to it. It saves the reader from typing or copy pasting it on to another taskbar.

Besides that, I think it's a great beginning to a blog, I definitely plan to keep referring to it when I'm thinking of adding new features to my own blog (which I keep doing very regularly). Keep writing and updating!

Cheers!

Hey Shezah,

Thank you for such a detailed review.

Yes I did use some javascript for getting that format. I'll soon post about how you can get that for your own blog. About the clear design, it took me a couple a months to get it the way I wanted. Soon I'm going to be releasing some blogger templates that I've designed. They all have a simple clean look.

A lot of people have found the header unimpressive. I'm working on it. If you have any specific suggestions about the header please mention them.

You have also said something about the need to jazz up a bit. Can u pls eleborate on that? It'd be really helpful.

I checked out your blog InRetort. Its gr8. I wish I could use a header like yours. Everything about your blog is very creative. You should write more.

Again, thanks for taking the time out for reviewing my blog. And pls give me some suggestions for the header.

Hi Pankaj,

Thanks for uploading the blogger template, I'll have a look and see if I could adapt it for my own design. 

About the header. I designed mine on photoshop. Earlier the header was just the bulletin board with a lot of post-it notes on it but I was always unhappy because it made the blog look really crowded. Then I decided to use simple white space and and drew the stick figures with my graphic pen on photoshop and just experimented with positions until I got something I was happy with. I'm not very good at drawing so this is honestly the best I can do. I still feel the blog needs some tidying up in terms of removing the green outline on the post box and stuff, but I'm happy for now. I want to see if there's some ready made template I can use instead.

I had a look at what other tech blogs are doing and noticed that most designs are very simplistic which is good. If you don't want to work on photoshop or anything, my suggestion would be to download a good font and have it in white over a red background (something like your Display pic on indiblogger). If you don't want to lose the clean space you have, maybe you could try a very simple white gradient effect background. If you can't create a gradient on photoshop, just google 'Gradient Background' and you should find some options to download. Make sure the gradient you choose is very subtle and not jarring. I googled 'metal gradients' for you and found one that might work:

http://tinyurl.com/4xyystg 

You could use a premium looking font on this and have a very lovely looking template. Make sure the fonts you use are modern classic - nothing to designy, have a look at the kind gizmodo and engadget have to know what I'm talking about. The one you use currently is nice too actually.

If you want to try something more creative and know the basics of photoshop, another idea I had was maybe you could a plain white backround (similar to how I have it on my blog) and photoshop an iPad screen to show your blog's name. The screen should be white with just the blog name on it. Here are some reference pics that you could edit: 

http://tinyurl.com/6axyjlm 

http://tinyurl.com/6zvform

So those are just what I could recommend off the top of my head, in the end it's a matter of trial and error, sometimes some Idea that sounds good will actually look really disappointing when applied, so the trick is to keep experimenting until you get it right. I already like the way it's looking now actually, I don't want to see you change it much, but if you do, please ensure it's as neat as it currently is :)

Hope that was helpful. Cheers!

wow Shezah!

you actually took out time to look up images for me. thanks a ton for that.. 

I'm glad that you liked the current look..and i'm looking up fonts in the other tabs right now..

I have already tried the red bg white letters header but it drew attention away from the content so i dropped it.. 

i think for now, i should focus on the content so i'll just change the header font and go back to writing..

As a thank you I would like to design a template for your blog..just let me know your exact requirements and I would give it a try.. If you like it you can use it for your blog..

thanks again.. your feedback really helped me..