It’s depressing, quite frankly, looking at how quickly the design I cobbled together for this blog has aged. I’ve got a few sites I’m hoping to start work on in the near future - one’s going to be this blog, one will be a review site that I’m hoping will encourage me to start writing, enjoy it, and never stop, and the third is a new home for the hand converter - so I’ve been looking at CMS, wordpress templates, and other people’s personal sites for inspiration. And that’s even more depressing. Some people, it seems, just get it, and others, like me, don’t. The designy part of my brain is just too inactive, it seems. Couple that with the frustration at trying to get things just so in CSS, and it makes me want to silently weep.
For example: this looks pretty neat, as does this in its own way (I’m very much into this vertical design thing at the moment), and although I can see in my mind various things I could do with my own layouts, I don’t know that I can turn woolly thoughts in my head into hard CSS and actual, real web pages.
But I don’t want to just cop out and take a template that someone else has designed, just because it’s a) lazy, and b) designed originally for someone else and for another site. It wouldn’t be mine, and it wouldn’t feel mine.
I quite like the flow of this design, though, although it’s sometimes a bit cryptic.
Maybe I just need to approach it all professionally. If I sit down and log the hours it takes me to get the review site running, maybe I’ll be more focussed on the design as I work. Maybe I should start sketching designs out as well.
11 Comments on Pains and changes
Pains and changes…
nice…..
Pains and changes…
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Pains and changes…
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Pains and changes…
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Pains and changes…
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Pains and changes…
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Pains and changes…
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nice… spam guys. I appreciate the effort.
I was just moaning yesterday about how difficult it is to find good reviews that you trust. CNET is pretty much the only place you’ll find lots of reviews on google, and I don’t trust them - they never go in depth and they don’t seem to ever say anything really nasty about something.
Of course, dpreview is great for digital cameras. I went looking for printer reviews, and found a site that gave an indepth. 6 page review of a few different printers, and yet somehow managed to neglect to mention the quality of the output. Madness!
I’m interested to see how you’ll do it - It’s very useful in reviews to have comparisons with other items in it’s class (particularly if they have a small turning circle), but it’d get expensive if you had to buy each one. Are you thinking of getting other people to pitch in as well so you can get greater coverage?
The expensive way to trust reviews is to try them, I suppose. If you buy something on a recommendation and like it, it’s starting to look more like you agree with the reviewers’ opinions.
But then again just because you like something, or a few things, after reading a review by one person at site x, that doesn’t mean that you’ll like what any of their other reviewers like: that’s something that can be really hard to pin down. Maybe I haven’t tried hard enough but I’ve never found it that easy to cross-reference individual reviewers.
The horrible way is to go anywhere that has endless reviews by people that loved something. I always want to read the bad reviews rather than the fulsome praise, because that’s where you’re more likely to find reviews by people that have used and lived with the item, and found the flaws.
Having said all that, at the moment I’m just planning on a couple of things: one is to review all the media I own, and the second is to review anything and everything, but I’m not sure how that would work…
While I’m hat-tipping nice designs, I came across some lovely menus and pop-ups here
To answer your last question, I’m all in favour of anyone joining in. As long as visitorare given enough pointers to help them work out how closely in general they match a reviewers opinions (ie what else have they reviewed, and did I agree with them or not on that?), the more the merrier.
I expect all this is being done a hundred times over right now.
I’m trying to imagine how this could open up into something social and collaborative (again without just copying what’s already out there)