Would you critique my website theme please?

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alforddm

alforddm

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I've been working on my website off and on for a while now. It's built on drupal 8 and I took a base theme and have been working on creating a theme I like. I would like to have your opinions.

http://dippera.com/

There are a few things that I haven't gotten 100% the way I like them such as the buttons. I'm still working on those.

I plan to add a gallery for the rabbits and other critters but right now I'm just showing how basic posts will appear with some dummy text.

Thanks everyone!
 
It's cute! I really like the color scheme and fonts so far. :)
 
I don't know what all goes into making a website, but I'll give you my impressions at least :D

I like the colors and background you picked out, they keep things focused on the posts. Cute logo at the top, too, I am drawn to all things simple or stylized and that apple tree is fabulous. Question regarding the set-up of the site, though... I see a log in button and it mentions logging in to post comments. Is this for screening purposes to make sure you don't get a bunch of spam or worse (ARA's, anyone?) in the comments sections? Because I like that thought, but I don't know if there might be an easier way to achieve something like that. There are already so many sites I have to enter a username and password for, I don't like adding new websites to that list (this may be just a me thing, but all the different passwords drive me nuts).

The website looks great though, and a gallery for bunnies and such will be very highly anticipated! :popcorn:
 
Nymphadora":2ra667vv said:
I don't know what all goes into making a website, but I'll give you my impressions at least :D

I like the colors and background you picked out, they keep things focused on the posts. Cute logo at the top, too, I am drawn to all things simple or stylized and that apple tree is fabulous. Question regarding the set-up of the site, though... I see a log in button and it mentions logging in to post comments. Is this for screening purposes to make sure you don't get a bunch of spam or worse (ARA's, anyone?) in the comments sections? Because I like that thought, but I don't know if there might be an easier way to achieve something like that. There are already so many sites I have to enter a username and password for, I don't like adding new websites to that list (this may be just a me thing, but all the different passwords drive me nuts).

The website looks great though, and a gallery for bunnies and such will be very highly anticipated! :popcorn:
Click to expand...

Thanks for the comments and the point you raise about spam is a very good one. It's something EVERY site has to worry about.

When I actually get everything ready to go, I will use a couple of different spam protection techniques. I may use disqus which allows commenting through facebook (depends on if it's free for low traffic sites :lol:), or perhaps a login through facebook or some such. Drupal has several very good spam protection modules and I'll have go through them all and decide which ones will suit my needs. Since this is the first site I have done in Drupal 8 the modules might be a bit different from what I have used in the past.

For now I'm basically using those buttons for theming purposes to make sure I don't skip theming certain elements.
 
I'm useless on the technical aspects of websites (my son, MidnightCoder takes care of all that, thank goodness!) but I like the general look of the site.

However, I winced when I saw this:
The Easy way to Grow a Ragweed Patch for Rabbits (and Why you Should)?

I'd be a lot happier seeing:
The Easy Way to Grow a Ragweed Patch for Rabbits (and why you should.)


I know I'm being picky and you should feel free to tell me where to go, but in my opinion, you need to standardize the capitalization and get rid of the question mark -- this is not a question, it is advice. (and good advice too!)
 
MaggieJ":2esl902j said:
I'm useless on the technical aspects of websites (my son, MidnightCoder takes care of all that, thank goodness!) but I like the general look of the site.

However, I winced when I saw this:
The Easy way to Grow a Ragweed Patch for Rabbits (and Why you Should)?

I'd be a lot happier seeing:
The Easy Way to Grow a Ragweed Patch for Rabbits (and why you should.)


I know I'm being picky and you should feel free to tell me where to go, but in my opinion, you need to standardize the capitalization and get rid of the question mark -- this is not a question, it is advice. (and good advice too!)
Click to expand...

Lol I had to look this up and see what was actually the right way to do it.

The Easy Way to Grow a Ragweed Patch for Rabbits (and Why You Should)
Click to expand...

Is the correct way because what is in the parentheses is still part of the title. Also, because it is a title and not a question, there should be no punctuation. I also think that (W) is way and (Y) in you should also be capitalize which I had not done in the original.

Now one of these days maybe I'll actually get the article written to go with the title. :lol: :lol:
 
alforddm":2oos9yhf said:
Lol I had to look this up and see what was actually the right way to do it.

The Easy Way to Grow a Ragweed Patch for Rabbits (and Why You Should)
Click to expand...

Is the correct way because what is in the parentheses is still part of the title. Also, because it is a title and not a question, there should be no punctuation. I also think that (W) is way and (Y) in you should also be capitalize which I had not done in the original.

Now one of these days maybe I'll actually get the article written to go with the title. :lol: :lol:
Click to expand...

Yes, that looks fine to me now. To a certain extent, these things are subjective . . . but as a writer, obvious problems seem to pop out at me. I'm so glad you didn't take offence!
 
I appreciate the criticism. Writing generally does not come easy to me, despite the fact that love to read. I generally have to write something, and then forget about it for a while, and then reread and edit it. Even then I often miss things and find them later while rereading something I wrote months ago.
 
First let me say, I work in IT so my view point is from working with these type of sites. If you are looking for free blog space they can be great.

I agree with the others on the colors. It is easy on the eyes.

The logo is nice as well. I am assuming from it you specialize in rabbits and chickens. May have a farm for apple and pumpkins. If that isn't the case, it might stand a change. Logos in this area should represent what products you specialize in if you use them in it.

I would increase the Font size on the Title. It should stand out. Try it above and below the logo if possible. I know some of these standard formats for blogs don't always offer that. I would also change the font on the title to make it stand out from the other text in the blog.

I would also look at adding some form of navigation. The problem with blogs is finding old articles of interest. The search function is good, but having a way to navigate to all articles concerning rabbits or chickens will help to increase your hits and offer up more information to those looking for articles like that.

Are you wanting it to be a website or more of a blog? The format\style you are using is a blog layout. If you play to use it for commerce, then I would not use this style unless you plan to create that site later and just link to this as your blog.

I hope this helps. Good luck!
 
TheChad":wheck9f9 said:
First let me say, I work in IT so my view point is from working with these type of sites. If you are looking for free blog space they can be great.

I agree with the others on the colors. It is easy on the eyes.

The logo is nice as well. I am assuming from it you specialize in rabbits and chickens. May have a farm for apple and pumpkins. If that isn't the case, it might stand a change. Logos in this area should represent what products you specialize in if you use them in it.

I would increase the Font size on the Title. It should stand out. Try it above and below the logo if possible. I know some of these standard formats for blogs don't always offer that. I would also change the font on the title to make it stand out from the other text in the blog.

I would also look at adding some form of navigation. The problem with blogs is finding old articles of interest. The search function is good, but having a way to navigate to all articles concerning rabbits or chickens will help to increase your hits and offer up more information to those looking for articles like that.

Are you wanting it to be a website or more of a blog? The format\style you are using is a blog layout. If you play to use it for commerce, then I would not use this style unless you plan to create that site later and just link to this as your blog.

I hope this helps. Good luck!
Click to expand...

Thanks so much for the tips! It's always nice to talk to someone who actually works with websites. I try to read and research things but it's not the same as working with them everyday.

This isn't a free blog site. I have my own hosted server (digitalocean) which is run on nginx. I have several other sites I've built. http://colorgenetics.info is the main one. It's also the reason why I have my own server. This is however, the first one I've actually tried to theme from scratch. All the other themes were purchased with fairly minor changes. Since it's the bootstrap theme for drupal so I can pretty much make any changes I want.

I'll make the site title larger :lol: and see about a different font. I'll have you know, I went to alot of trouble trying to get that title to fit beside the logo correctly :gun: 8) :lol:

I will add more navigation as I add pages. I plan on doing static pages for the animals/farm, and then having blog posts as well. It's easy to do blog archive navigation in Drupal. I will also probably do a photo gallery just because they are fun to do. I'm sure wordpress has some wonderful tools as well but I started with Drupal years ago and have mostly stuck with it because that is what I know. I will also add a module that rewrite the urls to the article titles instead of the generic /node/1.

I'm gratified that everyone likes the logo. I did it myself and I'm not normally very artistic. I actually drew the tree and then used opensource clip art for the rabbit, pumpkin, and chickens. Inkscape is the program I used if anyone is interested. It's an open source vector graphics program. I was trying for simple yet explanatory and evidently I managed to do it. Yaye!

We do have a small young orchard (5 apple trees, 2 peach, 3 plum, 2 muscadine vines, 7 blackberry, and hopefully a mulberry tree if I can get my transplant to live). Pumpkins/squash are some of my favorite things to grow. This year I grew Jonathan pumpkins, yellow squash, tatume squash, hubbard squash, lady Godiva squash, and the regular Halloween pumpkins. For the past 3 years the Halloween pumpkins have come back every year by just throwing the pumpkins over the fence. The seem to grow quite nicely without my help. That is probably why I like to grow pumpkins so much. It might be interesting though next year to see what cross pollination happened with all the different c. pepo I grew. Then we have chickens for eggs and I raise rabbits for meat.

Ok I think I rambled enough I'm done...

Oh what does everyone think of the purple footer I added? I'm not sure I like it, but I can't seem find anything I like better.
 
alforddm":3r703k6z said:
TheChad":3r703k6z said:
First let me say, I work in IT so my view point is from working with these type of sites. If you are looking for free blog space they can be great.

I agree with the others on the colors. It is easy on the eyes.

The logo is nice as well. I am assuming from it you specialize in rabbits and chickens. May have a farm for apple and pumpkins. If that isn't the case, it might stand a change. Logos in this area should represent what products you specialize in if you use them in it.

I would increase the Font size on the Title. It should stand out. Try it above and below the logo if possible. I know some of these standard formats for blogs don't always offer that. I would also change the font on the title to make it stand out from the other text in the blog.

I would also look at adding some form of navigation. The problem with blogs is finding old articles of interest. The search function is good, but having a way to navigate to all articles concerning rabbits or chickens will help to increase your hits and offer up more information to those looking for articles like that.

Are you wanting it to be a website or more of a blog? The format\style you are using is a blog layout. If you play to use it for commerce, then I would not use this style unless you plan to create that site later and just link to this as your blog.

I hope this helps. Good luck!
Click to expand...

Thanks so much for the tips! It's always nice to talk to someone who actually works with websites. I try to read and research things but it's not the same as working with them everyday.

This isn't a free blog site. I have my own hosted server (digitalocean) which is run on nginx. I have several other sites I've built. http://colorgenetics.info is the main one. It's also the reason why I have my own server. This is however, the first one I've actually tried to theme from scratch. All the other themes were purchased with fairly minor changes. Since it's the bootstrap theme for drupal so I can pretty much make any changes I want.

I'll make the site title larger :lol: and see about a different font. I'll have you know, I went to alot of trouble trying to get that title to fit beside the logo correctly :gun: 8) :lol:

I will add more navigation as I add pages. I plan on doing static pages for the animals/farm, and then having blog posts as well. It's easy to do blog archive navigation in Drupal. I will also probably do a photo gallery just because they are fun to do. I'm sure wordpress has some wonderful tools as well but I started with Drupal years ago and have mostly stuck with it because that is what I know. I will also add a module that rewrite the urls to the article titles instead of the generic /node/1.

I'm gratified that everyone likes the logo. I did it myself and I'm not normally very artistic. I actually drew the tree and then used opensource clip art for the rabbit, pumpkin, and chickens. Inkscape is the program I used if anyone is interested. It's an open source vector graphics program. I was trying for simple yet explanatory and evidently I managed to do it. Yaye!

We do have a small young orchard (5 apple trees, 2 peach, 3 plum, 2 muscadine vines, 7 blackberry, and hopefully a mulberry tree if I can get my transplant to live). Pumpkins/squash are some of my favorite things to grow. This year I grew Jonathan pumpkins, yellow squash, tatume squash, hubbard squash, lady Godiva squash, and the regular Halloween pumpkins. For the past 3 years the Halloween pumpkins have come back every year by just throwing the pumpkins over the fence. The seem to grow quite nicely without my help. That is probably why I like to grow pumpkins so much. It might be interesting though next year to see what cross pollination happened with all the different c. pepo I grew. Then we have chickens for eggs and I raise rabbits for meat.

Ok I think I rambled enough I'm done...

Oh what does everyone think of the purple footer I added? I'm not sure I like it, but I can't seem find anything I like better.
Click to expand...



I know how you feel fighting against a site trying to get it to do what you want.
 
TheChad":wv20dpuv said:
I know how you feel fighting against a site trying to get it to do what you want.
Click to expand...

I finally found a nice bluish gray color that I like and that I feel goes well with the site for the footer region. I also enlarged the site title text and added a tiny bit of shadow. I did decide to leave the title to the side of the logo. I really do like it better that way and I don't want to make the header region any taller than it already is. I decided to leave the font as well. This is my site I can do it the way I want :tease:

Now I'm working on developing a photo gallery but it will probably take me a while to get that finished. Depends on how much time I actually get to devote. So, if you see random photos added to the site that don't seem like they fit anywhere that is why. :lol:

Thanks again for everyone who commented on the theme. I'm still open to suggestions if anyone sees anything they think I should change.
 
alforddm":1pcvrzib said:
TheChad":1pcvrzib said:
I know how you feel fighting against a site trying to get it to do what you want.
Click to expand...

I finally found a nice bluish gray color that I like and that I feel goes well with the site for the footer region. I also enlarged the site title text and added a tiny bit of shadow. I did decide to leave the title to the side of the logo. I really do like it better that way and I don't want to make the header region any taller than it already is. I decided to leave the font as well. This is my site I can do it the way I want :tease:

Now I'm working on developing a photo gallery but it will probably take me a while to get that finished. Depends on how much time I actually get to devote. So, if you see random photos added to the site that don't seem like they fit anywhere that is why. :lol:

Thanks again for everyone who commented on the theme. I'm still open to suggestions if anyone sees anything they think I should change.
Click to expand...


I am never commenting again after that mean and hurtful emoticon. LOL jk :coffee-screen: :eek:verreaction: :komp_cr: :writelines: :protest:
 

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