I would greatly appreciate some design, technical, and general feedback on my first website!

https://mis.haus/

Hello, Everyone!

I would love to hear what you guys think about my website. Please tell me any little comment you may have, whether it be about the design, the writings within, or the technical glitches—literally anything you want to say! Constructive feedback is very welcome, but I'll appreciate any comments at all.

I treat this website as more of my personal corner of the massive web. My poems, articles about poetry and the false claims of Holocaust denialism, and even experiments with AI programs litter this place. Also, please excuse the primitive state of my "Haus Assistant." It needs a lot of work done on it to make it seamless, I know. You're supposed to be able to chat with it, but I haven't optimized and trained it enough yet; it's basically just a linear, point-and-click text tour of what the site's about.

This is my first live website, and I really wanted to make it somewhat "unique." A lot of the content is very tongue-in-cheek and not intended to be too professional or "sterile." I initially had plans to make it more tuned towards the neo-brutalist web design philosophy, but I got frustrated with the technicalities, so I gave up somewhere along the way and just focused on the content. I'm also sticking to the monochrome theme because it helps with my eyes, and I'm sure it helps a lot of other people too.

Fun fact: my site heavily uses the Adobe Caslon Pro font, which is what the New Yorker Magazine uses for its printed issues. Does anyone know if I need to license this font? I don't make any money from this site nor is it associated with a registered company, so I've always assumed that I didn’t need to. I do have a paid subscription for Adobe Fonts, though.

This site also has very heavy CSS tweaks on the homepage, so let me know if you encounter any glitches or lag. I'm sure that the IBM Watson Assistant and moderate amounts of Javascripting and custom CSS aren't helping the speed at all either. I think it normally gets a performance score of 50% to 65% in Google PageSpeed Insights. Accessibility, best practices, and SEO are all perfect, though. I would make an effort to boost that performance score higher, but that would require me to take some elements out that I'm not ready to let go of yet (and also because I'm not an expert on web design).

One thing that does bother me a little is the juxtaposition between the Holocaust writings I have and the overall non-seriousness/whimsicality of the rest of the writings on my site. Anyone else feeling like I'm disrespecting the legacy of the Holocaust?

I'm not too worried about SEO, analytics, and all that, but I would like more people to visit my site. How would I go about advertising something like this? Any suggestions would be great!

Thanks in advance,

John

https://mis.haus/
 

Hey @johnbacud 

It's um.....busy! I also think you're going to lose a lot of people with the pop up on your site. It's a lot of text, and most people find pop ups incredibly annoying. Not to mention that the 'walk away' button doesn't do anything.

The site needs some room to breathe...there's just so much text that the eyes can't take it all in. Having images, more spacing, and fewer columns is a good place to start.