Robslounge: Online Blog and Portfolio

[mseerob]

Please visit my website. It involves online blog where I like to provide information and talk about my personal life, and you

can view my portfolio on the websites that I've worked on in the past.

 

http://www.robslounge.com

 

Please let me know what you think!

 

PS: If you are interested in a link exchange then please let me know!!!!!

[ILMV]

I cannot comment on style, because my Ubuntu + FF3 breaks things

 

But I can say that I find the sidebar on the right far too cluttering, it draws so much attention away from the content. Having linkshare on there is an eyesore, Google translate isn't required as if someone really wants to read about your personal life they will translate via Google themselves.

 

Your normal links with a tall thin Google adwrods underneath would work well I think.

 

 

As for content, try and make some images smaller, even on a 19" screen the picture of the phone takes most of it up.

 

 

Regards, ILMV

[stublackett]

Very nice site Rob! Something that I'm looking to follow similar lines of.

I like the idea of mixing a blog on your site with general Portfolio stuff, Blends quite nicely and the colour scheme and layout is very good!

 

Liking the blog on how you wanted the site to look from its initial layout

[TheFilmGod]

The top left navigation should not use text | separators. Instead, you shoul use border-left or border-right in the ul css.

 

This would improve semantics and SEO.

[nrg_alpha]

Not bad at all.. not trying to be too fancy.. simple and too the point.

 

Do try to have your code validate.

 

The menu item 'Home' is too close to the enclosed rectangle.. I would think shifting the menu away a bit to give it more room to breath..(if not center the menu outright).

 

The performance, while not terrible on my lowly DSL, was a bit sluggish.. so I checked your homepage out on Yslow.. it shows the following:

 

11 javascripts? Ouch. May want to look into perhaps simplifying this.. merge some smaller related scripts.. use obfuscating /minifying utilities to strip out spaces and whatnot to help reduce their sizes... Also, if possible, try to relocate scripts to the bottom of your page, as javascript downloads hinders the progression of the rest of the webpage and it's rendition.

 

If your server supports gzipping of .php files, you can add the following code to the top of your pages:

if (substr_count($_SERVER['HTTP_ACCEPT_ENCODING'], 'gzip')) ob_start("ob_gzhandler"); else ob_start();

 

The server will gzip php pages for browsers that support it (which is most these days)..If your sever or browser does not support it, no big deal.. it simply sends the uncompressed php file. Could save on some bandwidth there..

 

The breakdown for your homepage on a non-cached browser:

24.9K 1 HTML/Text

4.4K 1 IFrame

306.5K 2 Flash Objects

222.5K 11 JavaScript Files

10.5K 1 Stylesheet File

417.7K 3 CSS Images

475.4K 13 Images

 

1462.2K Total size

 

32 HTTP requests

 

As you can see, lots of optimizations can be had there to be sure. Your page consumes over a meg! The image / javascript and flash fronts are especially heavy..All this drains on your bandwidth..and thus reduces snappy site response times..  Consider passing your images through smush.it! to save some memory without the image quality compromises..

 

Overall, its clean and simple enough.. just a bit sluggish.

 

Cheers,

 

NRG