My website using Graphene

  • KungFuGrip

    #5003

    Hi, just showcasing what I have done with the graphene theme at http://www.samoanbios.com – its a Biography website for people with Samoan heritage. I welcome any pointers from experts on here that would better utilize the sites theme to ensure it is user friendly for children to older audiences. Cheers!!

    Admin

    Syahir Hakim

    #30238

    A few suggestions from a brief look on the site:

    • Remove the visitor counter in the footer
    • Group together some of the secondary menu items so that the entire secondary menu is only a single line
    • The paragraph text on your front page all uses the h5 element instead of p. Change them to p.
    • Perhaps add a thin, light border around each widget
    • Change the slider animation from slide to fade
    • I would also think that placing the slider at the top would be better
    • You’ve placed an email address in the Contact page without any protection. This is a prime target for spambots. Removing the email address altogether should be fine, since you’ve already provided a contact form there.
    • In archive page (such as this one), there are too many borders in between post. One border should be enough, rather than two at the moment.
    • Perhaps change the colour scheme to match the Samoan flag colour?
    • Background is too plain. A light, patterned background would be nice.

    The videos in the footer widget area looks cool though.

    KungFuGrip

    #30240

    Hi Syahir,

    I did pretty much all of what you suggested except one, which was the secondary menu, because I forgot to mention earlier that I was still adding categories that would eventually fill up the rest of the blank space showing.

    Everything else I did:

    removed counter in footer

    changed my paragraphs to p from h5

    added a thin border around widgets

    changed the animation slider to fade from slide

    placed the slider at the top

    removed contact email address

    removed 2nd border from archives

    (i tried to do a color scheme using Samoan flag colors, but it just go with the dark grey menu/navigation/header area, so maybe that’s two things I didn’t do, not one lol oops!) and the background, i added a tropical samoan beach picture and took all the bright colors out… cause it was distracting and made the site look too busy.. so i went with your idea of a patterned background, by using like a silhouette in grey shade. if that makes sense lol

    Thanks for you help in improving my site!!

    Admin

    Syahir Hakim

    #30241

    Looks better now 🙂 You’d probably want to remove the thin border for the footer widget though. Don’t really need it with the videos.

    The thing with the secondary menu is that you’d want to have as few top-level menu items as possible so that visitors won’t be lost. Frankly, anything over a line is just too much. You’d want visitors to be able to grasp what’s available on your site at a single glance.

    KungFuGrip

    #30242

    Evening Syahir,

    Thanks, your input does help out a lot. It makes it more user-friendly for my visitors.

    I played around with the css to remove the thin border around the footer widget as you suggested. I wasn’t exactly sure of the code to remove it, but with some Firebug help and some knowledge gained on css from reading pretty much all the forum questions you have answered over the months/years.. I finally got it done lol

    Also, I removed the secondary menu and opted for the drop down menu to the side (Categories) which also provided the number of posts within each category, available to the visitor.

    It looks more cleaner with all the changes I have made 🙂

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