try giving some positive comments along with your constructive criticism in the future. it’s a golden rule of guanxi. it does no harm, appeases the client and makes your criticism appear more constructive rather than offensive.

The Performancing Ads region at the bottom of the sidebar looks a bit messy with the two columns (Friend Connect and the t-shirt ad) above it. I think it looked better before with the MyBlogLog Recent Readers widget above it, but I understand how it may be redundant with the GFC. Plus, Rick didn’t like it. ;) Anyway, I think you might need a horizontal “bookend” (shit, this is hard to explain) to help clean up that little corner, something that straddles both columns of the sidebar like the medium rectangle ad at the top. It looks messy because of the dissonant vertical lines, and because the oddnews.org advertisement has blending white space.

I think Rick mentioned that it’d be good to have recent comments or links to recent posts on the sidebar as well. It may be redundant with the footer but not every visitor may scroll to the bottom especially on the longer post pages, so you want to make it convenient for them to convert to another page on the sidebar.

One last thing, your WP-SpamFree tends to give a lot of false positives. After losing a comment or two, I’ve gotten into the habit of copying my comment before pressing submit just in case it gets lost. That way, I can come back, reload the page, and try again. Anyway, not sure what you can do about that though since blog spam is a big problem and most people hate captcha.

Home Page:

Featured Posts changed to show newest 6 posts.

Sidebar:

Recent Readers removed.
Google Friend Connect moved.

Please let me know what you think. Thank you.

Thank you for your comments. I know not everyone like the new design but I hope after some time more people will become accustomed to it. Why it has been changed like this has many reasons. Of course I think it will be better for chinaSMACK. There may be some changes if they are necessary. For example, the Recent Comments was changed because of some good suggestion. There will also be some new things soon too that I hope will make the website better and more easy to use for visitors and readers.

Thank everyone for your understanding, patience, and support.

Also thank Tom2, Peteryang, Joe, Tom2, MJ, Hello Kitty webindex, fireworks, Shanghai Steve, and Kai (回复长度超牛), for your compliment.

I think most people think the new design sucks mostly because they’re used to something and anything that disrupts it just annoys them.

I think that the visitor community and discussions within the comments is what really brings the board to life – not the posts – which, quite frankly, have gotten more banal as of late :)

That said, chinaSMACK is still a blog and most blogs are still premised on the idea of initiating and having conversations. That’s what comments are for. There’s nothing wrong with her “focus on visitor comments” if that’s something she enjoys about her website.

In any case, I just noticed the front page’s Recent Comments box that so many people disliked has been minimized into a drop down. I think this is a good compromise. Those who visit the front page and want a quick glimpse of the latest comments can get them. Those who don’t, can just scroll down past it without it taking too much space.

As for the design. I visit ChinaSmack to read about news events in China, not to read the comments. The “What is ChinaSmack” page states:

“I decided to make this website and share a ’slice of Chinese life’ with English-speaking foreigners. I will collect and repost all of the hot, popular, interesting, outrageous, and shocking things that I see on the Chinese-language internet so foreigners can understand, experience, and enjoy also.”

I think the goal is admirable, but is becoming diluted with your focus on visitor comments.

Thanks for creating this site for foreigners like myself.

I like the comments having 2 shades of colours to show the comments more visibly.