Any thoughts on the web design of my blog?

It’s nice but kinda confusing heh…maybe im just dumb though lol I think its a nice concept maybe you can give a little more direction on how to navigate through it thogh…

What’s confusing?

Generally I like what you’ve done, but…

I find that the initial page is a little confusing too. Perhaps if the word you clicked was ‘Enter’ or ‘Home’ rather than your name. Also I initially thought that each letter of your name was linking to a separate page, because generally a separate roll-over effect like that is used to indicate a choice in which page you visit.

I like the look of it, the graphics are nice, but I find it hard to navigate without a constant navigation interface, it would be good if you had a site map or a set of links at the top of the page which were consistent across every page.

Similarly, perhaps the homepage would flow better if the site title and archive/email links were on the left, or the top. Studies of people’s eye movements have shown that people read sites in an ‘F’ shape, so it would be best if you grouped your important links and information to fit that shape.

Also, the first page you see (Thomas.html) gives no information about your site, or yourself. Perhaps if you added a subtitle to the ‘Thomas’ text, things would make a bit more sense.

The ‘1/4’ and ‘1/2’ things (dates I think) are clever, but they confused me initially because I’m not used to dates like that, and neither is most of the world (we go Day/Month/Year) and I immediately assumed that they were a fraction (its purpose was unknown to me until I worked out they were dates!), perhaps just adding an ‘09’ to the end would make things a bit more obvious for slower people (myself included).

(I hope this doesn’t sound too critical, it’s far better than alot of the stuff one sees from MobileMe/iWeb!)

Don’t know if you’re used to design critique or not, but I went through it in art school…

1. I interpreted the 1/4 on the front page as being “page one of four.”
2. The rollover states of the individual letters (versus the entire word) implies that each letter goes to a different page, but they don’t.
3. The second page feel a tad narcissistic (and most blogs essentially are, so I’m treading a fine line here)—I’d be more inclined to read further if it appeared you were talking about interesting things instead of talking about yourself. (That’s how I see it, anyway.)
4. I actually like the intro page – it intrigued me enough to click through, at least.

Good luck and carry on -

I got a little confused by the above as well. Although I’m impressed at what you’ve done with iWeb.
Nice work ^_^

i agree i thought each letter was linking to something different until i went back and looked at the link page in my status bar. That was really the most confusing part. It’s nice, but you should really sit down and pretend to be an average user that knows nothing about the site, even someone who knows very little about the internet and try to view it from that angle. That’s what I do, if I feel in that situation I’d be confused, I try to change it. Its hard because when you are working on something, it seems to logical to you because you have so much experience with it and its your idea, but to someone else, its not always so clear cut. However good work though :)

You could remove the completely useless start page.

Okay, redo: http://web.mac.com/elumas/www.Thomas.com/home.html

Much better. Just a few minor details:

1) Increase the margins on the boxes. Ideally, your margins should be equal or double your leading. Any less and it looks squished in.
2) Increase the font size of the Bio paragraph.
3) Pretty up the thumbnails or something. They look dull. Try adding a border.