What Sarah Said What Sarah Said is a personal blog, belonging to Sarah of course. It was picked out of a CSS gallery to be this week’s review candidate; a high quality candidate!

What Has Been Done Well?

  • Color. No-one will argue that the color scheme here isn’t unique. The unusual combination looks great, and works perfectly. Getting this right has instantly made WSS memorable.
  • Fluid width. Few blogs use a fluid width design, and there are often good reasons not to. However, it’s nice to see it every once in a while, especially on a blog with as little sidebar content as this one.
  • Logo. At first, I was a little miffed at the amount of space wasted in the top left, but you can’t help but like the cheek of the little pop-out face. Very memorably design.
  • Typography. Typography on a fluid design with an offbeat color scheme isn’t easy, but it has been done really well on What Sarah Said. Take a look and see.

What Could Be Improved?

  • Link styles and color. There are a few different colors used on text within the content. It’s hard to tell which ones are actually links. Perhaps an underline? Beyond that, some of the links don’t have rollover effects, which is a shame.
  • Post titles. The posts are well spaced out on the home page. The problem here was that I found myself consistently reading the dates before the titles. Does the date font need to be so big?
  • Fluid bugs. There is the odd bug or 2 in the fluid layout still to be ironed out. The two I noticed were that at a large resolution, the sidebar loses it’s shape slightly, and at 1024×768, part of the "Site Info" link is pushed to a second line. They’re not crucial, but such a good design deserves flawless coding.
  • Navigation. I know that it’s a personal blog, but a little more help with the navigation would be nice. The Archives link is buried down in the footer. Why not put it in the sidebar as well? Or add a "Recently Posted" widget to the sidebar? It would give more incentive to read around the blog.

All in all, What Sarah Said is a very memorably designed blog. The unique color scheme, layout and logo are fantastic, and more than enough to make any design great.

With that said though, even a gorgeously designed blog such as this can still fall down in usability. Had this not been a personal blog, things like the poor navigation would have been a much bigger problem.

What do you think of it?

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