Ben, It's awesome!! I like the new banner at the top as well as the new font. Great job!!

I think it looks pretty good, although change is scary, you know! I don't know if it's just the way I'm viewing it, but I have a scroll bar at the bottom, which means I have to scroll to the right to see the right-hand side of the third column. I think it makes it look “less” thank it could. I do feel like it's easy to navigate, however, if not a tad crowded.

(Sorry if I don't seem totally supportive – I figure you want honest feedback. I really do think you did a good job! I especially like the header.)

I was actually thinking that your previous design didn't do justice to your blog. This new design is really excellent!

Big thumbs up Ben

That's great, Ben!

The three column style and the color's match is great, a clean style, and honestly so much more better than the old one.

I think it looks nice and clean. Plus, the title of your post was a SUPER way to get RSS readers to click over and actually visit .

Maybe you should do a screen shot of the old blog so new visitors can compare new to old.

Good job!

Ben – Change is scary but it is also empowering – it feels good to flex those muscles.

It is nice and clean but you will need to add pictures of some sort to more of your posts to keep it from looking to clinical.

Great work!

Thanks for all the feedback.

Lorna – what resolution are you at?

Does anyone else see a scrollbar at the bottom?

Char – I agree regarding the pictures, that was one of my fears with this style of design: looking to clinical (which to me is the opposite of inviting.)

Hey Ben!

The change looks good. I especially like the new color scheme.

The scroll bar shows up at 800×600. The cutoff is about half way through your subscribe button, so the contact link is off screen. All content shows up, though.

I love it Ben!

In fact, this might just inspire me to give my blog a new look. It's definitely time for a face lift over there.

Good job, Ben. I like the imagery of the boxing gloves… challenging people to think about what you write.

Rick – that's what I figured. The width is 850, so it's really designed for higher resolutions. I don't like the idea of the CONTACT not showing (although there's a visible EMAIL ME link), and I don't like the SUBSCRIBE button being cut off. I may move it to the left sidebar…

I do know from my own research that 800×600 is a fairly small percentage of Web users, but again, this is the kind of thing that concerned me with switching and going 3-column — making the site LESS inviting…

Thanks to everyone for the feedback.

Looks good but I read this site through an RSS feed so it doesn't matter that much.

GREAT JOB! Congratulations! Very impressed with the design. How do you do it all???

I am not sure what it looked like before, but it looks very clean as others have pointed out.

One important thing, your RSS auto-discovery seems to be broken/missing. It is very important for numerous things, especially making it easy to subscribe , but also can play a role in syndication etc.

Andy – I tried it with Google Reader and it picked up the FeedBurner feed.

Can you try again and let me know what happens?

I've just added a snippet of code into the header — I'm hoping auto-discovery picks up the FeedBurner feed.

Thanks!

It is working now – I wasn't getting an icon at the time I commented, and when I hit subscribe GR couldn't find the feed.

Auto-discovery comes up with the following

http://www.google.com/reader/view/feed/http%3A%…

Not bad. Very clean-looking. Do you find a better response for the body-sidebar-sidebar layout than sidebar-body-sidebar?

Looks nice, Ben. I like the clean look. I agree with Char about the pictures. Also, though I run a higher res, I tend to keep my sidebar open in FF making the viewing area smaller, so I get the vertical scroller too. That loses your 3rd column, so you might want to move your subscription stuff to the second column, and keep “less critical” stuff in the 3rd.

Just my $0.02… anyway

I'm using Internet Explorer at 1280 by 800. As of this afternoon, there is no scroll bar at the bottom of my screen. That helped things to be spaced out better, and it's looking really good now. Everything seems to have been able to stretch out a bit, which leaves more white space for a nice, clean look.

Even better would be to place subscription information in prime real estate, that magic triangle right where people suggest placing Adsense.

Great point, Andy. I definitely didn't miss yours the first time I visited, and thought, “what a great idea.”

Nice and clean Ben! A suggestion … I would add some more padding in the sidebar tags so that the items such as Popular Posts, Topics etc have a little more white space and are easier to read (at the moment they appear a little “swished” and it is hard to just scan.

Andy and Tony (and others) — let me know what you think of the “subscribe box” that shows up on top now. I think it's only showing properly on single posts – so click through to take a look.

Leah – I agree. I've added some padding, but I think I may use a little graphic of some kind to help highlight individual elements in the sidebar.

That works well, at least in Firefox.

One of my biggest problems is making mine work in IE. It was looking ok in IE6 but IE7 messed it up again.