review request: nicora.net

nice clean and very functional. I love the random banner and the hint of dropshadow neer the top. The only thing i will comment on is the load time it was a little large.
but overall an amazing feat of garphics and html blended together seamlessly.

Very slow loading for some reason, the photo page is taking forever, I'll try again later.

from what I did see (two pages), same impressive work as we are used to

Explicitly set the page background colour to white. Otherwise text that overflows the upper regions with background images end up in my browser's default body background colour, grey.

I like it, looks really professional. Did you make it all yourself from scratch?

Tee hee. I saw this thread and assumed you were doing another redesign of your company site! LOL. Not so this time...

This design does look really good. I like the splotches in the background and red is my favourite colour The site would look really boring without that, but it's a daring choice.

I'm finding the text to be very small - too hard to read comfortably. You don't need me to tell you why, do you? Also, I'm finding a little bit of overstyling in the blog elements, like the Read more link and the comments bar. Too much. It would blend in better with the rest of the site if it was kept simple. I also think that dashed borders should definitely not be used for links or text of any kind for that matter. Interferes with the text characters and makes it harder to read.

I really like the overall design. Nice and clean and simple. The mouseovers on the navbar should be a little lighter. The difference should be more striking between the on and off states.

I really don't like the way the colours are changing from page to page. Sometimes this is a godo technique but in this case I don't really think it's necessary. You've also chosen colours there that are too much different from the front page. It's lacking unity. The red on the home page is darker and less saturated while the other pages (except for the black & white one) are very bright, neon colours. Honestly, I would just keep them all the same. No real reason to change the colours here.

Good job overall, despite my nitpicking

dont you realise ,Megan, that the color scheme is random. I think its done with php or somthing.
I like it a lot and think its a very nice touch. It kept me entertained for quite a while .

No, not really. The stylesheet is random, or cycling somehow, so the photo and colours are changing. The same colours do keep showing up for me. So unless it's not working properly in my browser the colour choices and associated photos are random.

I think this is sort of a neat thing to try but I am finding it really confusing. When I don't always get the same design on the same page I start second guessing where I am - especially when the same design reappears on another page.

Oh, okay, so the colours are pulled from the pictures. Hmmm.... I'm not sure what I think about the whole premise still, but you probably aren't going to listen to me anyway so who cares

Neat trick the background changing on color keys. The only problem this flies in the face of good website design. Although I feel good design is more or less what one likes personally, but that does not mean others will like it as well.

Personally the site is to garish for my taste, especially with the changing backgrounds.

Second on that steve... But Hey your site has the best implementation of grayscale ive ever seen... cut the loading wait please...

Looks nice, pleasing to the eyes. It just load slow, especially the pictures page took like 10 seconds.

ok, really busy this week guys, so I just wanted to say a few things and hopefully I can talk more this weekend.

First, thanks everyone for the comments, please keep them coming. I plan on keeping this design for a long time, so I would like to flush it out as well as possible.

Megan, great review as always!
A few things I would like to address, the font - you more accurately represent the Internet population, I'm sure, when it come to font size. How do you feel about text sizers? I think I will up the default font size, at least for the side bar.

As far as the color schemes, they are randomly selected server side and every scheme is associated with a photo. Now, after looking at the site for a few weeks, I have realized that the randomness has to be a bit confusing. So I have plotted this idea, and please, let me know what you think.

I will create a module that will display "themes" each scheme I currently have will be a theme that a user can select, and with cookies remember. That way it is up to the user to select his/her favorite theme. I can also include a "randomize me" button that will continue to implement random themes on every page. I think by default, I will have the red theme, it’s my favorite as well.

I’ll be back soon!

That sounds like a better idea - leave it up to the user's control. You could do the same thing with the text size if you wanted to. Text sizers are good if the pre-set text size is too small or otherwise unreadable. I think people who habitually prefer to browse at a non-standard font size have their browsers set to do so. That's the main reason why I think it's best to keep the font size close to the default. Then people don't have to keep changing their browser setting for every site they visit.

Pure geinius

Hello,
I have seen alot of blogs and I must say yours is one of the best. Great design. Photos loaded a little slowly but other than that everythings great.
Carol777

This is really great. In terms of usability i recommend a search feature. The way you use your colors is impressive. I had to show my mother -she likes it a lot

ok, I implemented the theme functionality - still have the textsizer yet to do.

Tyler, there is a search function, the link is in the right column under archives named "search the archives".
http://www.nicora.net/index.cfm/search/search.html

text sizer is done, i decided to do it server side in case that 0.08% that has javascript disabled visits.