I’m sure some of these suggestions have been already been noted. I’m not claiming originality.

1) Move the menu column on the right to the left and narrow it up. Add a little color for visual interest.

2) Move the quote of the day to a dedicated box: Maybe link it to a second page that lists the prior 30 quotes of the day, with the oldest rolling off the bottom each time a new one is added.

3) Put blog post TITLES in the main screen, with links to each individual one on another page. Then you can have a rolling view of maybe the past 7 days of blog post titles, with links to each. Maybe some kind of archiving system could keep older blog entries segregated by month automatically, with a drop down box somewhere that links to a menu page of archived titles, with the ability to link to the individual post by clicking on the title. This would allow you to reuse code from the main blog screen.

4) Replace the little header boxes with one big picture. Maybe rotate the pictures daily if you need the variation. Concentrate on fast load over visual interest.

5) Drop the little tabs above the title boxes They are redundant and incomplete.

6) The links to your business should more prominent and dignified, but more subtle. I’d put them in a box that has a nice background color, CSS rollover color text, and probably in the blog header or another place impossible to ignore, but not boorish in you face blatant. It’ll be a balancing act, but it should non verbally state you are open for business and a class act.

I haven’t looked beyond this stuff, but it should be enough to get you started.

2) As someone who has spent a lot of time with software designers, I have a few professional usability comments for you. Hopefully you will condifer them and implement as you feel appropriate.

I have an appointment soon so I probably won’t finish the full list of observations.

I will be blunt. Please do not take this personal. If I wanted to be rude, I would be more creative and colorful.

Overall, this site appears to have the look of a design for personal (your) fulfillment and not for usability. Basically, you have to press too many buttons to get anything done, existing buttons are not clear in purpose, appearance is valued over usability, it is slow to load,content is spread over too many pages, and content is not obvious.

In olden days, in usability testing, I would surround myself with people who would tell me the truth and ignore people who would tell me what I wanted to hear and those who wanted to take things over. They would be told of the objective and be asked “what’s wrong with it” with the expectation of honest answers. Once trust developed, problems were identified with abandon. I get the feeling here that your team learned the appropriate range of disagreement and then stayed within it.

Have to go now. If you want some examples, go to some popular sites and compare theirs to yours. If you want to make yours better looking than theirs, then fine. Just don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.

But from the point of view of a web professional, fully 130 vertical pixels at the top of the page that deliver neither content nor functionality: the most important ones, to boot. While it’s a matter of taste as to whether those pixels are aesthetically engaging, I would submit that nothing that holds no content or functionality is worth that great an expenditure of prime screen real estate.

The category tabs across the top, and the BP branding are the only elements of value, and those could be made lighter-weight and more space-efficient. I hope not to offend with this input; it’s offered in a spirit of support, not one of negativism (nor nattering nor nabobbery).

Thanks.

First, thanks for your solicitude in getting the site right.
Second, a lot of the commenters are obviously much more savvy about up-to-date widgets than I, but for my 2 cents worth:

RE Password – As noted in my email to you, the ability to change one’s password from an assigned, random gobble-de-gook sequence to a mnemonic would be much appreciated.
Your reply “I am just getting up to speed on WP, so Im clueless – try logging out an reregistering under a different name”
Can somebody out there with WordPress savvy, provide the info Barry needs to fix this relatively minor but aggravating issue?

RE Archives – I find the calendar a frustrating affordance as most often I can’t even guesstimate the date of an earlier post that I want to find. A chronological, retro-order scroll list of post titles would be more this trogolodyte’s cup of tea.

RE header – you replied “I thought about the header size — but the nature of the blog is you scroll past it quickly — it almost doesn’t matter whats there”
Who is the “you” in that sentence?
Consider what Splash page objectives should be, in light of two audiences:
- first time viewer: where am I? what is the site about? how do I use it?
- regular users: efficiency/utility of affordances, e.g., links are buried at the bottom of the page, could/should be at the top also.

Evaluate everything on the splash page in terms of “what information is conveyed?” and utility.
e.g., the row of pretty pictures in the header? Info quotient, near zero; utility quotient, zero.
If I have to scroll past it, it’s in the way. If it slows download times (for us viewers in the boonies with dial-up ISPs), it’s in the way of my efficient use of the site.

Suggested first cut at re-design of the splash header:
- Lose (or at least reduce in number and/or size of) the two rows of graphics and the Flash
- Take the descriptive copy out of the TBP logo in the upper left and spread it across the top of the space now occupied by the graphix
- Gary’s suggestion re a bookmark http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/#label is a good compromise though

Love the idea of drop down menu open as the default

Here are some recommendations for wordpress plugins:
- For your book reviews the Now Reading plug in from Rob Miller.
- For stats I simply use the WordPress.com Stats plugin
- To improve usability: wp-print and wp-email
- To improve visibility of your best/most popular/related content Yet Another Related Posts Plugin and Popularity Contest.
- To get better rankings in Google: All in One SEO Pack and Google XML Sitemaps, and for searches from Google: Landing pages

One plugin I find cool but you might not like iit if you don´t like Flash si Featurific for Wordpress

Another tip is your blog is not up to date, and your theme’s header.php file is showing the version of wordpress you are using…making it easy for hackers to hack into the site and add spammy links to your blog. you can fix this by removing the part from your header.php file and by keeping wordpress up to date.