"I thought this could do with a bit of thought about design, so I sat down for half an hour and hacked together a style sheet". This may or may not be an improvement.
Ouch! Thanks for the honesty, though. :-)
I tried moving the boxes about 1em further apart
I'll meet you half-way -- a 2em gap looks too big to my eye, but I like 1.5em more than the original 1em.
putting the text within the boxes a uniform 1em from the edges
Oops! I didn't realize that this wasn't uniform.
changing the borders from #000 to #999 (and #ccc for the rule between the box header and the main content)
That looks a bit too weak to my eye, but I agree on the principle -- I've dropped them to #555 and #aaa.
The hover highlighting [...]
I spent an obscene amount of time trying to decide what I wanted to do there -- changing the background was the first idea I had, but I couldn't get it to look a way I liked. I think I'll have to come back to this once I've gotten away from looking at that menu for a while.
...sans-serif faces...
Sigh. I hate the idea of specifying fonts in web pages... why can't web browsers just pick a reasonable default? But you're right, it does look much better with sans-serif -- consider it changed.
... reducing the contrast just a bit...
Lowered contrast helps readability, but I hate the look of grey text (maybe this is just a personal thing -- but I'd like to be able to look at my website without wincing), so I've done this using an off-white background instead.
On the About page, you should probably make "portsnap" and "FreeBSD Update" into links.
I considered that, but there's nothing sensible to make them link to -- I have pages about portsnap and FreeBSD Update on my personal site, but they are several years out of date.
I wonder whether your legal page needs to say explicitly that the "Why?"s aren't part of the legal agreement.
My law student friends tell me that this isn't a problem; and it doesn't matter anyway since I really don't care if the explanations are somehow interpreted as part of the terms.
Too many parentheses on the "Utility" page.
Good point, I didn't realize how many parenthetical remarks I was making when I wrote that text.
On the why-picodollars page, you probably mean 2^-40, not 2^(-30).
Oops!
On the why-10^9 page, you claim that nothing other than RAM is addressed in hardware. This is, of course, not true. You might consider replacing "RAM" with "memory", or something.
Is it not true? I can't think of any non-random access memory which is addressed in the same way as RAM is.
On the scrypt page, PBKDF2 and bcrypt should be links.
Good idea.
It's a pity that the Why? links bounce the user to a new page.
Those links should be opening up in a new window -- aren't they? That's what happens in my web browser, but it's entirely possible that I did something non-portable.
Thanks for all the excellent suggestions -- this is exactly the sort of comment I was hoping to get here. I'm not necessarily going to follow all of your suggestions, but even those I'm not following have provided very useful food for thought.
non-random access memory: I suppose it depends on how you define "RAM". To almost everyone (even in your target audience, I think) "RAM" doesn't mean "any randomly-accessed memory", it means something like "fast writeable randomly-accessed memory whose vendors call it RAM". For instance, mask ROM would not generally be called RAM, even though it's addressed in hardware and commonly comes in power-of-2 sizes.
should be opening up in a new window: ah, I see. I've got so firmly into the habit of middle-clicking such links that I didn't even try left-clicking :-). (Which, yes, means that if you make them do fancy AJAX stuff then I will lose out...)
You probably already think I'm an asshole, but even though it's fun to tweak a design until it's "just right," none of these changes will have a big impact on your bottom line.
1em versus 1.5 vs 2em? That's premature optimization.
And statements like "[l]owered contrast helps readability, but I hate the look of grey text" tell me you're designing for yourself, not for your customer.
That's fine, if that's what you're doing, but I've been assuming the opposite, viz., that your goal is to increase the number of people who pay for tarsnap.
you're designing for yourself, not for your customer
Not quite. In the absence of hard evidence either way (yes, I know, A/B testing -- but there isn't enough traffic on the tarsnap website right now to get any statistical significance for minor changes) website design is purely a matter of taste... and if it's going to be a matter of taste, why not go with mine?
And what you said isn't true, although most engineers I know believe it. It's not A/B testing or bust, and design isn't series of arbitrary aesthetic decisions.
You can also gather (non-numerical) data by going out and talking to potential customers, figuring out exactly what they need, and then making design decisions with that as an input.
That's not entirely true. Design and typography pros have over the centuries developed a series of rules and guidelines for what constitutes good and usable design. These have generally proven to be fairly universal and are more than simply a matter of taste.
Ouch! Thanks for the honesty, though. :-)
I tried moving the boxes about 1em further apart
I'll meet you half-way -- a 2em gap looks too big to my eye, but I like 1.5em more than the original 1em.
putting the text within the boxes a uniform 1em from the edges
Oops! I didn't realize that this wasn't uniform.
changing the borders from #000 to #999 (and #ccc for the rule between the box header and the main content)
That looks a bit too weak to my eye, but I agree on the principle -- I've dropped them to #555 and #aaa.
The hover highlighting [...]
I spent an obscene amount of time trying to decide what I wanted to do there -- changing the background was the first idea I had, but I couldn't get it to look a way I liked. I think I'll have to come back to this once I've gotten away from looking at that menu for a while.
...sans-serif faces...
Sigh. I hate the idea of specifying fonts in web pages... why can't web browsers just pick a reasonable default? But you're right, it does look much better with sans-serif -- consider it changed.
... reducing the contrast just a bit...
Lowered contrast helps readability, but I hate the look of grey text (maybe this is just a personal thing -- but I'd like to be able to look at my website without wincing), so I've done this using an off-white background instead.
On the About page, you should probably make "portsnap" and "FreeBSD Update" into links.
I considered that, but there's nothing sensible to make them link to -- I have pages about portsnap and FreeBSD Update on my personal site, but they are several years out of date.
I wonder whether your legal page needs to say explicitly that the "Why?"s aren't part of the legal agreement.
My law student friends tell me that this isn't a problem; and it doesn't matter anyway since I really don't care if the explanations are somehow interpreted as part of the terms.
Too many parentheses on the "Utility" page.
Good point, I didn't realize how many parenthetical remarks I was making when I wrote that text.
On the why-picodollars page, you probably mean 2^-40, not 2^(-30).
Oops!
On the why-10^9 page, you claim that nothing other than RAM is addressed in hardware. This is, of course, not true. You might consider replacing "RAM" with "memory", or something.
Is it not true? I can't think of any non-random access memory which is addressed in the same way as RAM is.
On the scrypt page, PBKDF2 and bcrypt should be links.
Good idea.
It's a pity that the Why? links bounce the user to a new page.
Those links should be opening up in a new window -- aren't they? That's what happens in my web browser, but it's entirely possible that I did something non-portable.
Thanks for all the excellent suggestions -- this is exactly the sort of comment I was hoping to get here. I'm not necessarily going to follow all of your suggestions, but even those I'm not following have provided very useful food for thought.