Bad Design

For this post I thought I'd find a random webpage and critique the design on it. So googled myself and found the webpage of a "rock keyboardist" who shares my last name. After a few very entertaining minutes, I decided he's the winner (and also not related to me). I won't name him or link to him because I don't really want him to see this, in case he comes after me with a flaming keyboard, but if you google my last name and rock keyboardist, I am sure you can find it.

A good thing that he did was to keep the basic template consistent throughout the site. He has the same graphic as a header on each page, with links neatly laid out beneath. Same color scheme, same fonts. All good. Only thing I would say is that the pictures in the graphic are pretty flashy, so he could have chosen just one to use, and make the name more prominent.
Now. His "News" page has blocks of text all down the left half of the page and pictures on the right, which was a kind of boring layout to scroll through. Instead of breaking up the text to go with the photos, it would have been better to use the natural break between news from different days, and adding a few good pictures according to that. Maybe play with some text-wrapping.
As it is, sometimes the text runs right into the side of its accompanying picture, and sometimes there is an awkwardly large gap. It appears that he left-aligned the text in one column and centered the pictures in the other. So he could use some consistency in alignment. The pictures seem to be sized randomly, and some of the ones which clearly were not taken by Mr. Rock Keyboardist himself are not credited at all (these are usually the ones that are awkwardly small, so he probably just pulled them off the internet). The ones with captions said things like "with Jim" and nothing else. Also, most of the pictures had a red border around them which is weird and distracting.

The rest of the site is about the same, except for his "audio," "gear," and "store" pages, which are just too much of a design disaster to even touch. Clearly he has learned something since he made those, and hasn't gotten around to updating them yet. I will say one thing though: fireworks animation. *shudder*

Ps: if your eyes are hurting from that fireworks animation, here is a prettier design for you. Good color scheme throughout, including header graphic; pictures nicely integrated into the story; lovely sidebar action to the left. Not perfect, but pretty good for a blog, I thought.