The Glade 4.0

So a couple people noticed that when I posted my wife's site it had a free theme on it. We've been working on a custom theme for a while now, and finally made it live tonight.

Any and all feedback on the look and feel is much appreciated.

http://www.officialsunshine.com/

One thing I know that needs fixed is to make it so you can't see the lines of the background tiles. I'm just not very good at that.

That's pretty damn neat (in a self-admitted non-professional's opinion), and the entry that shows up first (yoga mat) really pairs well with the design at the top.

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko

I like it. Its much more professional looking than the one you linked before.

Some of the sidebar tags can be a little hard to read due to the background behind them. A little white text shadow would probably fix that.

Same deal with footer text, maybe margin it right over into the open area.

Maybe style some image captions for the photos, sometimes I'm not sure if she's talking about the picture above or below when she makes comments

Code Wise:
You can get rid of the sfHover conditional statement since you don't have any dropdowns :p

Edit, one more thing. The around the textarea doesn't have a for="" attribute like the other labels.

Looks very nice. I like the colors and layout. About the only suggestion I would have is that the text font is a little small, and as it's as swirly as it is it's a little hard to read. Increasing that a size or two should fix that tho.

It's really nice. Pretty, not overly gaudy and the right side of professionally slick to make it feel like a person is talking to you

I just realized all the content was hidden if you looked at it with IE7. I put in a fix so it should be visible in all browsers. Scary. Hope not to many people looked at it today with blank content.

Too girly. Needs fire and chainsaws IMO.

(Really, though, it looks good. I still can't see the content in the pictureframey looking things though, in IE6. Not that IE6 is something good to use, or supported, or any of that. Also could be getting blocked at work, if they are externally hosted images)

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It needs a sans-serif font.

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Minor issues:

1. In the browsers I tested with (Chrome, Firefox, IE8), the background and the flower pattern in the header push left as you make the window narrower than the min-width of the header/content container.
2. In Firefox, I get what looks like a 1px solid black line between the post title and the post container's upper border. It may be the background showing through a 1px gap -- it's kind of hard to tell.

Photoshop has an "offset" filter, as does Gimp (as a plugin). What you want to do is offset the image vertically by 1/2 its height and horizontally by 1/2 its width. The seam should now be in the middle of the image rather than the edges. Work the clone brush until you've removed the seam. Don't forget that you can clone luminosity, hue, or saturation independently of one another. Photoshop also lets you clone "color", which AFAIK is just hue + sat. Once you've blended out the seam, you can "un-offset" it and you should have a seamlessly tiling image.

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Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

Yeah, I've seen a tutorial on it, but for that step it just said blend the seams. I did notice the 1px gap in Firefox you're talking about. The hardest thing about this whole process so far has been making the CSS work.

I'll have to see if I can get a VM with IE 6 on it to test on.

Just wanted to say...

I love this! I don't wear alot of make up because I have never known what to buy or how to apply it so It doesn't make me look like a clown.. But I've been trying her suggestions out and I'm getting better!

Jhorra, tell your wife her blog is awsome! I have it on my favorites on my phone and read it regularly.

Her entry on scarves made me go get some and try out her tying tips. Love my new scarf look now!

Thanks!

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Dream as if you'll live forever...
...Live as if you'll die tomorrow

Vivere Senza Rimpianti

That's great, she'll love to hear that.