The History and Makings of a Webmistress
So I have been doing some website renovations as of late, spicing things up. I like to add new features and functionality to my website from time to time, like a project I am trying to perfect.
This is nothing new to me since I have been working on websites since I was 11. It all started with a simple Sailor Mars fan site on Expage. Then I moved on to Geocities, Homestead and finally self-hosted . Continuing with my anime fan sites, Digimon, first Mimi, then Rika, then a combination of the two, like Brangelina.
I became very proficient in teaching myself html design and the lingo of designing webpages. I wasn’t the most efficient nor the best, but I did enjoy it hence why I choose to study Computer Science in college. However, I eventually stopped website design around 2003 during my last years of high school and didn’t start up again until the birth of heynadine.com in 2008.
HeyNadine.com is currently my only website and it is my first venture into WordPress, which is a whole other world to me. Most of what I learned back in the early 2000′s is obsolete now so I am back on the learning curve. Forever learning, ever perfecting, but I do enjoy it. It is the littlest snippets of satisfaction I get every time I add another piece of content, introduce a new feature, or finally get some bit of code to work.
My website is my baby. I cherish it and nurture it and I want to see it grow and expand. That’s why I am always updating it, changing up the layout or adding plugins and widgets. Just the other night I started browsing themes again; if I changed this one over it would be heynadine.com theme number 8 I believe. Mainly I change the themes up because I get bored with the current one, or I am looking for more functionality than what my current one offers. Either way, I am always adding, changing and hopefully improving things for the better.
heynadine.com banners over the years
My goals for my website are to have my content more easily searchable, scalable and consumable. I am a visual person and I like graphics and videos and lots of colour. There is honestly a wealth of very interesting and exciting blog posts and video posts from over the last 4 years on this website.
I always want to make sure that you, my readers are also enjoying my website. So I am looking for feedback:
- What features do you like?
- Which ones do you not care for, or find distracting or useless?
- What would you like added to my site?
Let’s have a conversation and not make these boring website update posts so, well, boring. So please, I encourage you to spend a bit of time browsing my site and exploring all the posts. Tell me what you like so then I can add more!
Welcome, my name’s Nadine Sykora and this is my blog of crazy travels and online video life :) 
Attempt #3! :)
Since this is a conversation I’ll start off with a quick introduction :) Hey all! My name is Michael and I’m 22 from South Africa with a BSc Honours in Computer Science/Informatics. In terms of website design, I’m probably more of a technical guy than creative but here are my thoughts anyway :)
Personally I really like the green/black theme of the website. I can understand when you say get bored of it though because I have the same problem if I work on a project for a long period and I also always want to almost go back and change it all. It’s only because you’ve seen it so often cause you’ve probably worked on it for so long already but from a user point of view I still think it looks great :)
When it comes to adding widgets/functionality, my opinion on this is always a trade off because as you add little things, you also introduce clutter. This is where my lack of creativity doesn’t help because if you can find a way to add in functionality without having millions of things all over the site then that’s a WIN…role the final clip Steven! #TobuscusReference
Last thing I noticed (on my side at least), on the Home page, the thumbnails underneath the main slideshow don’t do anything for me when I click on them. Looking at the code you can see the anchor reference is there.
Which as far as I can tell, looks like it should work…I tried both Chrome and Firefox but neither of them redirected me. Strangely the bigger versions underneath those thumbnails links here fine :/ (Sorry if that part didn’t make sense, would probably be easier if I could show you a screenshot of what I’m talking about >.<)
Anyway, those are a few of my thoughts. What do you think?
- Michael
Hey Micheal, thank you so much for you reply! Yes, there is currently an error and it is know to the theme creator. I’m glad you enjoy my layout, it’s hard cause sometimes I get so numb to it because I look at it every day lol!
Thanks for you input!
Haha, yeah I can sympathise with that but don’t worry it’s looking great!
PS. Is there any reason the smileys put themselves on new lines? WordPress handles that I guess?
I don’t know why?!? I told myself I am going to figure it out one day lol
So I looked through the html and found this. In the Shoutbox Theme style sheet. It has:
img { border:none; padding: 0; margin:0; display:block;}
Since I can’t post a link, here’s what w3schools says the block attribute does:
“The element will generate a block box (a line break before and after the element)”
I guess you could ask the creator of the theme nicely to fix it :P
I like to think it has helped me reduce the amount of smiley faces I place in my blog posts. Which in turn is a good thing, lol.
After posting the last comment, I just noticed how silly this theme handles comments. Since each comment is indented from the previous comment, it’s gonna keep squashing the text with each new reply to the previous reply >.<
Are you using the Thesis theme?
No, it’s shoutbox.
Awesome, would love to apply this theme to my blog at http://www.thepegeek.com, im thinking of moving away from the wordpress hosted and moving to self hosted like my other websites such as http://www.thepegeekapps.com
BTW have you thought about building your own app for your amazing web presence? Could be either a web app, iOS or android? Would be happy to help you with this, perhaps my most recent blog post will help you
http://thepegeek.com/2012/03/22/make-your-own-apps-in-minutes/
i always wondered how you did this whole thing!!! The way i found out about you was when i was looking up new zealand videos on youtube. i particularly enjoy your travel videos!!!! There is sooooo many places i want to travel to- and on your web site i have seen so many place that are now on my bucket list to go to!!!!! I know it is hard to choose, but do you have a favorite?
I never knew you studied computer science lol thats pretty awesome. I would get completely frustrated trying to write all that code and feeling like every few years everything you know starts to seem obsolete lol, but i guess that how life goes and you never stop learning at anything.
As far as the website goes I am probably not much help but ill give you my opinion anyways:
I really like how the sidebar is where I can find those other little interesting things (like twitter updates) in one spot without over cluttering the page.
I also really like how easy to navigate the home page is and how the menu’s work with the really huge drop downs when you mouse over so its easy to find even old stuff pretty quick.
As far as the theme and stuff, i do like the colors and everything looks really polished so its very professional, but for some reason the background bugs me … idk why but i dont like tiled images
In my opinion though the best part of the website is this type of interaction with comments and your being able to respond. I think making it easy for you to see peoples feedback and easily comment back makes a good website since i think most people really like when the people they follow online are able to personally reply and it feels like just more personal i guess. I know i think its pretty cool since you are such a nice person and its good to talk in a way. I just recently started commenting on here and i find it a worthwhile reason to keep coming back to you site so yeah.
Idk if I make any sense.. sorry for my rambling.
-Alex
have you ever considered being a web designer because this website is actually pretty professional looking lol not just kissin your butt either
Haha, unfortunately, I didn’t actually design this site, it is a theme that I have customize for my own. I have designed lots of other site though :P
haha thanks! However, actually didn’t completely design the site, its a wordpress theme that I have just customized, ALOT .
Very good point about reducing smileys. Something I definitely should start doing. Sentences (in a conversation sense) just seem to look boring without them :-P (aha! my solution to smileys going to the next line!)
So what are some of your thoughts of what you would like to add or change for your site?
Crud, looks like my solution of putting the smiley like : – P failed *sad face* (win!)