I’m tinkering with ideas for the design here — kind of fun to do, but it’s definitely not one of my strong points (something that’s driven home when I keep seeing people come up with designs like this). Part of what I’m working with is something to seperate out the sidebars a bit. As it is now, I feel like the three columns blend together a bit too much, there’s no real visual distinction. I don’t want to go back to the boxy-borders look I used to have to separate things out — while it’s extremely simple to do by adding borders in CSS, it’s not very visually interesting.
So this is one possible idea I was dinking with tonight. Not a major redesign, and it pulls the columns out on their own while still pulling the eye into the center where the main content is with the lighter color. I’m just not entirely sure I really like it. Too grey, maybe? Hrmpf.
Someday I’m actually going to come up with a good, clean, attractive design. Until then (and that day may be a long, long time coming), I’ll keep poking, prodding, and stumbling around.
I think your site generally looks pretty good. On my iMac running IE 5.1, however, the left-hand column looks like an almost solid mass of small-point text.
You might try bolding the links in that column, and maybe shorten the text under each link. That would create a distinct “territory” on your site, setting it off from the main column.
I’m not a fan of grey backgrounds for text, much less coloured text on a coloured background.
Here is what Jimmy’s site has more of:
white space.
do not fear the white space. it is your friend. use it to direct the eye.
color (sometimes: red header is nice, yellow pull quotes are okay).
do not fear color, well used color in small amounts goes a long way.
greater heirarchy of items.
clearer heirarchy means i don’t get lost. i like not getting lost. size, color, weight, lines – use em!
bear this in mind: your site is very text heavy. it gets hard to read after a while when you don’t give the eye a break. make some space, use some color, make it easy for me to move through. you should consider forcing some white space into your page.