Been reading the feedback here and on my blog over the last few hours, and I have to say I agree with most of it. This was intended to be an initial concept that was going to be iterated on again and again, so I guess I have plenty to do to make this better!
I think you're missing the point here SeoxyS. I just put an initial concept out there for everyone to see and maybe get a flavour of how a redesign/reskinning of HN may look. I understand there's a lot to be desired and I haven't sat down yet and put the time into fleshing everything out properly, hence this will probably be iterated on a thousand times.
I appreciate the feedback, and will definitely take it into consideration.
Peter, good points -- I'll add the email address with the contact form instead of getting rid of it totally. Going to be adding a case study page that each piece of work links to, that has larger screenshots, more detail and depth on what work was done by myself etc.
Cabose, taken on board your feedback. I definitely need to accompany the work with a case study page detailing what work was done for each project. In terms of keeping everything on one page, the initial goal was to keep it a one-pager (or at least try to), but I guess I'll need to iterate on that.
Good points Daniel. Definitely valid - I actually re-considered the "Spam my inbox" tag a lot, and didn't come up with anything better so stuck with it for the time being. I'll definitely be re-thinking that.
Overall, seems to be a big hate towards contact forms -- I don't quite understand why as maybe I want a bit more information to qualify the contact (like info on where they found out about me, or budget)? Just giving an email address doesn't allow for this.
The funny thing is, this isn't just a problem in the developer community, it's across all creative fields (OK, it's not funny, you know what I mean :P).
I've always found that just starting with something very small to get into it always helps tons. I know it's a simple point, but it really does work wonders. Once you start, you'll just naturally progress and want to continue for a while longer.
Very good point. Scrapers really need to be dealt with and you should be able to define what you class as spam on a personal level in Google. It's astounding they haven't done it yet.