It's a bit... Pink.

[Hazel]

Hey, my programming focussed blog relaunched about a week ago, using Wordpress for the first time. I'd appreciate any help you can offer - as I guess you can tell I'm in no way a designer.

Blog: KillerCodingNinjaBunny (http://killercodingninjabunny.com)
Goals: To improve my technical writing, to share my portfolio (which is still growing), to help other people learn from my programming mistakes, to share my thoughts with other people, to make enough money to cover my hosting costs, to network with other programmers and bloggers.
Design Goals: As far as I can see, almost all programming related blogs looks really boring. I wanted to do something different an make mine stand out, which I guess I did, but it might be kind of over the top... I wanted to keep things fairly simple.
Audience: Other programmers and students, and of course my mum :P (my number one reader), so in general technically literate readers.
Other:Some specific questions:
1. Can you actually read the body text Ok?
2. Are the ads getting in the way?
3. I got a lot of traffic from Stumble Upon on my older site. Do you have any suggestions as to how I can change the site to covert more people into regular readers?

[Fred Sanford]

I probably won't be a whole lot of help but here ya go.

It always shows when someone puts time and effort into their site, yours is a glaring example. I love it. I don't think the pink is overbearing but I was a bit turned off by the black.

It's not hard to read but I personally think black backgrounds give off a certain vibe.... It's hard to explain, it just makes me feel confined. (maybe I'm just coo-coo though)

Your ads arent in the way whatsoever, I didn't even notice them at first to be honest, thats a good sign. I love the images you put in the posts, they make me take notice when I probably wouldn't have otherwise... keep that up.

[Hazel]

Thanks a lot for your help.

I tried to switch to a white background for the blog for a while, but I couldn't get it looking 'right', hence why it ended up going back to black. I think I'd like to keep the black background, so does anyone have any suggestions to keep it from looking too confined? I'll experiment with wider margins and see if that makes a difference at all.

[ses5909]

I like the pink as well too. I would like to see the body of the content a ligh shade of grey or some other complimentary color. Check out chrispian.com for some grey inspiration. Yours doesn't look bad, but there are a couple places that is hard to read (date for example).

[Hazel]

Thanks, I'll fiddle around with the design offline, and see if I get light grey or white backgrounds working.

[Jessi]

Pink generally scares the hell out of me. You should've seen my posts about when I changed my blog pink for Cancer Awareness Month....holy cow was it terrifying, heh.

Yours wasn't scary, though. I actually like the combo.....killer ninja=black....fluffy bunny=pink, hehe. I agree with Sara that changing it to a gray might knock the edge off it a little bit. It really is quite crisp and....out there. That alone may have been enough to make me stay on the site had I stumbled across it myself.

My only real complaint about it would be that the title, date, and tags are rather squished together. After I noticed the color, the second thing was how close all that text was together....each line is almost touching the next. Also, I'm not sure the tagged links really need to be at the top....maybe if they weren't pink links, it wouldn't stand out as much, but do people need to be drawn to the tags first each time? That's what the pink links do, so if you want to highlight the tags that much, then great, success! Otherwise, you might want to consider playing around with either the placement of those or the link colors in that section.

[Hazel]

Thanks Jessi.
I thought having the date close up to the post title looked kind of cool, but I left it dark not to draw attention. The tags were only put up there because they stuck out too much down the bottom, now you've mentioned it I agree, they're more obvious than they should be.
I'll see how they look in grey, and if not I guess I'll move them somewhere else.

[chrispian]

I think it looks really good. The pink is so retro 80s and I love it! Makes me want to get out my fat laces and go roller skating yet it still feels very modern and current. It's got lots of open space making the text easy to read.

The only problem I have with the pink is the high level of contrast from the black. It burns my eyes when I look from the black to the sidebar. That's also one of the things I like about it!

It's a solid design and put together well and I dig the name!

[Hazel]

Thanks - coming from someone with an awesome dark blog like yours that means a lot.

I think I'm sticking with the bright pink. I don't really know how to make the separation from black to pink less painful - I tried using a white line but that seems to make things worse, and fading didn't look right at all. I guess I'll just have to accept that.

I still need to fix the links as Jessi pointed out though, because now they've been mentioned they bother me too. Plus there are a couple of changes I need to make to get my xHTML to validate, but nothing major.

[ses5909]

Oh... another thing you need to get yourself is a good favicon. Something with that pink will work perfectly!

[Hazel]

Oh, I completely forgot about that! Thankyou.
I have a bunny shaped one from my old site, I think I'll update that with some bright pink.