I participate in a listserv for my high school's alumni. Today, someone asked for some career advice and I replied with a note.
Not long after I got this e-mail.
Its so unbelievably obnoxious... I love every word of it!
"hey, thanks for helping tim out, the dude needs it... i keep forgetting to mention that your blog layout is bizarrely out of sync with your apparent tech-savvy. that thing looks like an aol member homepage circa 1997. when i look at something like that i kind of expect the writer to be either barely computer-literate or barely
literate period, which makes for some weird cognitive dissonance given your breezy and confident blogspeak. maybe you know this already but don't have the time/money to get it fixed. it might be worth putting just a little time into. one really important thing is making it more readable--the content just doesn't have enough space."
And you know what? He's totally right. My blog layout is for suck.
Here's my issue: I need/want all this playspace on the side for blogrolls, tags, counters, etc. Now, Pete gives about half of Mashable to playspace and his stuff is readable.
Is it the black? Can there be no readability with these colors? Am I destined to succumb to Ajaxian whitespace?
I think I can still get away with black and perhaps the fix is simpler than that. I have a feeling that if someone could just play around with the actual posting column, break the grey up into rounded ajax looking boxes (one for each post), and fix my titles and footers, it would go a long way.
I don't have the time to do that at all. If anyone wants to play with my template, I'll e-mail it to them and give them a shot at it, or they can just view the source. I'm debating whether I care enough about it to pay someone to do it. Maybe I'll take them out to lunch for their trouble.