Template Criticism (UPDATE)

[markfh11q]

Hi all. Been working on my website again. Basically, a combination of domain expiration and lack of backups have led to me virtually creating my website from scratch about four times now.Anyways, got some of my content up, but I have a template I'm working on which I would like to improve if possible.It is a fixed width template (960px for 1024x768 minimum displays), with two columns, the leftmost column being the largest designed for content, with a right aligned sidebar for menus and page information.Background is a fixed repeating diagonal stripe deal, boxes are rounded corners with tabs for navigation and copyright info (top/bottom), and I have the CSS already written for sub-boxes containing information, edits, updates, whatever.When you visit the template, you'll also see a link for expanding the lorem ipsum text. This is to force the page to become longer than the window, which also showcases the vertical scrollbar trick which should prevent page-jumping when navigating to longer pages.All of it has been validated at XHTML 1.0 Strict. The CSS has one non-compliant element in it (the overflow-y property for the vertical scrollbar being always present), but I have tested the page on the most recent versions of Firefox, Internet Explorer, Chrome, Safari, and Opera.If you can think of any ideas which would improve the template, I'd love some suggestions.Anyway, enough talk (just trying to give you an idea before you click the link), here's the template.LINKY ---> http://www.mfanda.net/P.S. - the site the template is hosted on is mine. The template there now is similar structurally, but sort of just a throw-together so I could get it up and running. The template I'm working on now will replace the one already there in the near future...EDIT: I've went ahead and applied the template to my website. I've updated the link above. Checked it with the YSlow plugin and I seem to be doing good (got a 96). The result of this is of course you'll probably have to CTRL+F5 to see any updated versions (I'll tell you if I update).I'd still love some aesthetic criticism.Thanks,Mark

[cousineaug]

As an older person with failing eyes I offer the following:General layout is goodBright text colour FFFFEE is good, but #A0A0A0 is a bit too light for my eyes to read well on small print.Perhaps try #BBBBBB or perhaps #CCCCCCThe total black background is a bit boring. Have you considered something like a night sky? Little specks of white here and there on a medium sized image with some repeat would dress it up and still make it black and white design. Maybe a clump here and there like a nebula.If you want to be more subtle, you can create a small texture with dark grey like #22222 or #44444 just to give it some body.You probably want the XML sitemap for Google and I would put a disclaimer next to the link. An HTML site map would also be useful. Do you have the ability to generate dynamically? So Journal.html could say:Site JournalHTML SitemapXML Sitemap...Guy