A Little Housecleaning: Feedback Requested

Just in case you haven't noticed, I've been cleaning things up around here over the past few days.  (Note to Explorer users: I know the boxes in the left-hand sidebar are running wide--I'm trying to determine the cause of the problem.  Thanks for bearing with me...and have you ever considered using Firefox?  Um, just a thought.  Note to feed readers: Feel free to skip this post.)  Here's a quick orientation--and any feedback would be greatly appreciated:

• The "Stay in Touch" menu at the top of the left-hand sidebar includes links to subscribe to my feed, get updates by email, use my contact form, and my email and IM/Skype addresses.

• The "About Me" menu at the top of the right-hand sidebar includes links to my About page, as well as my Recent Transitions and Local Meeting Spots posts.  (I'll keep the latter two up for a while, but I'll probably update and/or replace them shortly.)  And on my About page, I've consolidated my reputation/profile links under the "For More Info..." menu, which currently includes LinkedIn, Opinity, Trufina and RapLeaf.  I'm uncertain as to how useful these services are--if you've found them helpful (or not), I'd love to know.

• I've moved the "Search This Site" links to the left-hand sidebar, at the top of the content navigation menus (Recent Posts, Recent Comments, Categories and Archives).  You can still choose between Google and Technorati, but I've added logos and simplified the interface.

• I cut out a few menus from the sidebars that didn't really seem useful--like my Del.icio.us tagroll, which you can still find as a link under the "Tools I Like" menu on the left.  And I'm about to do a major culling of the sites in my blogroll--they're all worthwhile reads, but I'm currently oversubscribed to technology sites and undersubscribed to management sites, and I need to adjust my feed reading to fit my current interests.

• I may not be done--I'm thinking about a new, less cryptic banner [Update: I've added a new banner and tweaked the color scheme] and a swanky top menu (if I have the guts to tackle it), and I'll definitely be adding a page on my professional services soon--but I'm reasonably happy with how things have turned out to date.  Thanks to TypePad for continuing to exceed expectations and to John Unger at TypePad Hacks for some great ideas.

Comments

[Andrew]

Site looks great Ed! The only thing I would tweak would be the header banner. The elements seem a bit scattershot, and the compression makes it a little blurry. Good stuff overall though...

[Ed Batista]

Thanks, Andrew! I really appreciate the feedback. And I'm wrestling with the banner. I've typically designed photo collages for banners, but I wanted something cleaner and simpler that would immediately orient people to my primary interests. I like the current structure (minimal text in Agency FB, one photo, and my avatar), but I agree that it could look tighter. And my wife's already told me she's not in love with the photo. I may ask someone with actual design chops to recreate this structure for me and add the ability to rotate photos.

Heh--I'm sure that was more than you wanted to know ;-) Thanks again!

Ed

[john t unger]

Ed,

I like what you've done with the "stay in touch" typelist. Looks great! I *would* suggest modifying the gmail/IM/phone image to more closely match the form fields you use for the subscription and email form info…

I took a look in Explorer to see how diffferent the form lengths were and they actually looked pretty close to firefox on my Mac. Might be just one version of IE that has difficulty? It can be pretty difficult to get IE to render pages properly at times… I'm afraid I don't have any concrete suggestions for you, but if you do a search for fields, forms and IE you might be able to find some kind of multi-browser CSS or html hack that will help. Let me know if you do…

[Ed Batista]

Thanks, John--I really appreciate your feedback! I wrestled with whether my contact info should match the banner and header font (Agency FB), the font used in the buttons in the "Stay in Touch" list, or some other font. I decided to go with Agency FB just because that seems to work best on the site's other pages (which include my contact info but not the "Stay in Touch" list)--but I may keep messing around with it and will think further about your suggestion.

And I've learned the hard way just how difficult it is to get things to look right in Explorer even when they look great in browsers like Firefox and Flock. I'll keep trying, but at some point I may have to put up an "Optimized for Firefox" button and leave things alone until I can get some real design help.

Thanks again for checking things out here, and thanks for all the great stuff at TypePadHacks.org. Outstanding site.

Ed