Digital Humanities

Mekayla,

First off, I find your site to be clean and well-organized. I think personal websites benefit a lot from being laid out in a simple and organized way, and your site is a good example of that ethos. The books on the top banner add a nice touch to the overall feel of the site without taking over–the focus is still very much on the title of the page. That said, I’ll provide some more detailed comments on other aspects of your page.

I like that your homepage is your ‘about’ page. I went back and forth on that myself, deciding whether to have a dedicated homepage or not. I think it works to direct users directly to your about page. It helps establish a quick rapport and give the user a good sense of who you are both personally and professionally. The actual text on this page is also well-written. It’s sufficiently detailed and personal while still being professional and succinct. The one odd thing about your ‘about’ page was the contact form at the end. Considering you have a whole page dedicated to that function, the contact form at the bottom of the ‘about’ page feels unnecessary, especially since the contact form box looks so large. It’s not a big deal, but you might try removing it and seeing how it looks. Perhaps adding another image could help balance out the page, if that was your concern.

Your portfolio page is nice. It makes sense to have a small section up at the top that details the most current work you’re doing, and than have more detailed complete stuff below that. The problem with that arrangement is this page could become pretty big and bloated if you allow those completed projects to display in their entirety there. Once you add another couple of projects, you might consider moving to a display setup where it only displays the title and the first 4-5 lines of the text, allowing the user to click to open the post up. That would keep the length of the page from getting out of control and ensure that users actually scroll to the bottom to see all the cool stuff you’re working on. It’d be a shame for people to miss something interesting because it’s buried under several full-length posts.

The ‘teaching’ page is obviously one of the meatier pages, and the photos do a nice job of balancing out all that text. Regarding the text itself–I like the more colloquial tone, but some of the sentences were a tad clunky or meandering. I didn’t spot any actual errors, just some syntax you’d probably want to clean up. The second and fifth paragraphs in particular had a couple sentences that might benefit from tightening up. Not that I don’t write long sentences–I certainly do. I guess that just makes me more more in-tune with that potential problem. Or at least I hope so. I also wonder whether you could combine and shorten a couple of the paragraphs. Paragraphs 3 and 4, for example, would fit nicely together and could be cropped. Another thing you might consider is having a synopsis or just the first paragraph of your statement there, and require the user to click to open up the whole statement. That would make it easier to see the ‘courses taught’ at the end of the statement. That’s an important section.

The reading list and service sections are well-written and well-organized. I might steal your idea and include a reading list on my own website, though I already have something similar on my blog, which is linked to the website, so maybe not. On your contact form, I wonder if you could find a different plugin that would make for smaller form boxes. I don’t know if it’s just me, but those boxes seem large on my display and nearly take over the whole page. Could just be my computer, but try pulling it up on different devices and see whether it is an issue for you.

Overall, I think this is a well-functioning and aesthetically pleasing site. It seems that we have similar tastes when it comes to layout and style. We both opted for clean single-page-at-a-time designs, which are simple and easy to navigate. The only minor thing that I didn’t quite like about the theme was how the menu bar at the top becomes transparent and the text is visible behind the menu buttons when you scroll down. It just looked a little odd and it seems that an opaque menu would be cleaner. This obviously isn’t a usability issue–just a quirk.

Hope that’s helpful–sorry about going on so long. Again, I think it works quite well and is a pleasure to click through. Cheers!