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Thursday, April 17, 2008

Site Update: What would you like to change? What is missing?

Hey guys,

I've never gotten any email or comments about how I could improve this site. Since I want this to be a good resource for my students and anybody else who reads this, please let me know what you would like to change, add, remove, etc.

Please leave a comment to this post with any suggestions. Don't be shy, it's for your own good. :)

- image source

20 comments:

Anonymous said...

I think you said it best JD, when you told us not to put so many ADs on our webpages. ;]

Jean-Denis Haas said...

Hahahahaha! Nice. Problem is, as giving as I want to be, I do need to fund the extra time spent on this. :)

So you're saying they are distracting? Should they be in another placement?

Jack said...

Hi, I'm an avid subscriber of this blog. I think you're doing a great job. My only suggestion is about the layout: I think the menu column on the extreme right is a bit too crowded.
Anyway, thanks for keeping this site open to everyone interested in learning/getting better at what we do. Keep up with the great work!

Anonymous said...

yeah. thats understandable. But if you add the links and the ads, its the same size as the important stuff, the postings! Its like 50/50.

If you can make the blog bigger and the links/ads smaller that would help a bunch. Asymmetry!

Maybe make the link's text smaller and add some black space that will separate the links from the actual blog postings. That would help a lot. Everything is so cluttered.

But the blog itself, you're doing a great job.

Jean-Denis Haas said...

Hmm... now I'm confused. I did separate each column by color. Are you saying that the links on the side columns should be bigger? All the posts are always on the left on grey, so I'm not quite sure how that is confusing.

Sorry for the back and forth, but I appreciate the comments!

Anonymous said...

Sorry man. I confuse myself sometimes. This is what I meant.

http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d164/jfvictorious/blog1.jpg

Just separating things a little bit more. Everything right now is all bunched up. And the text in Red is bigger than the text in Black which is distracting. (But now that i look at it, the text doesn't bother me that much.)

I don't know much about blogs and how much control you have over editing it but i figured this small thing would make it easier to read.
=]

no biggie~

Anonymous said...

http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d164/
jfvictorious/blog1.jpg

David Bernal said...

Just a small suggestion :) thought maybe it would look better if the white column was on the left so the blog (the posts) are in the middle, and have all the links on the right column and all the other things like advertising, the Google search, labels, and "the contact me" on the left one.
also a quick way/tip to see how your page layout is working on different computers is by pressing control and scrolling with the mouse wheel up and down so the text size increases/decreases so it "kind of" simulates various screen resolutions.

Jean-Denis Haas said...

Okay Jeff, now I get it. I'll try to make that work.
It all changes from IE to Firefox (which I recommend) to different types of machines.

David: I thought that since we are so accustomed to reading from left to right that I should post the blog post first on the left. But if the two side columns make it too busy, I'll think about a new layout.

Thanks again for the comments!!

Erik Lee said...

Just have a small suggestion for this blog, when it has QT videos, could you please set it "Click to play"?(I know sometimes it has, but not always.) Sometimes it really slow my browser down to open this blog when the video is set in auto-play.
Otherwise is all great, thank you for running this blog, I learn a lot from it, thank you so much!:-)

Jean-Denis Haas said...

I've been getting this comment actually. I don't think I have time to go back and fix older movies (except the workflow post), but ever since that remark I've been doing it for longer movies.

For shots like walkcycles or stuff like that I won't do it, the load time of a 200kb movie shouldn't be a problem. Unless you have dial up.

Ratul Sarna said...

This is my favorite blog. There's so much to learn from it. I haven't read all the posts in it.
Once, I started to do that and was lost for hours and then when I looked out of the window, I saw that it was morning already and I had to leave it (but I didn't want to).

The site's rocking already! I just hope that it keeps doing so.
Thanx Jean!

shiva said...

i don't think you need to change anything...it's good as it is...only thing missing is your workflow ;)

Jean-Denis Haas said...

Yep, that damn workflow :) It's on my list to do, but there is one thing that has to be done before. Almost there!

jeff said...

this site is so chock full o'data, it might be nice to use a tabbed template and get some of the info off of the main page, but still have it accessible

http://www.geckoandfly.com/2006/05/27/andreas02-blogger-template/

Jean-Denis Haas said...

Yeah, thought about that too, I'm using that one on Animation Buffet a bit.
What would you like to have separated between tabs?

jeff said...

my suggestion would be to have 2 columns, not 3, that way the adds won't be so oppressive. move the search bar to either a footer or into the header, then some general categories

faq/class notes - some sort of general link for things specific to your students.

-recommended sites

-resources

-archive/labels - for older posts

from these categories, you can have subcategories, since your site is a mini-wikipedia by this point. but i think reducing the columns to 2 would let your main column be more prominent

Jean-Denis Haas said...

Awesome suggestions Jeff!! Thanks a lot!

damncreative said...

Hey JD. I ve been a daily visitor and a big fan of your blog. Its just gr8. And right now i think everything has fallen in place.Really good layout. Gr8 resources.It has helped lot of people around the globe and i am sure will do the same in future.
Just a small suggestion.

Some your posts are really useful and handy . I think if we ve a section for some important posts, it would be gr8. Cos we can access it right away when ever we need . Cos some posts are so good,people tend to forget in their busy schedule and when they want it back, they got to search. Wat say?

Thanx a lot and keep up the gr8 work jean:)

Jean-Denis Haas said...

Hey "damncreative", that's a good suggestion. It's hard for me though to know which ones are the people's favorites.

Which ones do you like the most?

There should be a way to implement a "did you find this post useful" button and have a ranked post summary somewhere.

Thanks again for the input!

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