usability of this site

ponderings / usability / this site

i have to confess to not putting my full usability prowess to work on this site. for anyone who is interested here is some reasoning behind a couple of the things I've done...

	originally none of the links had underlines (because obviously it looks much better this way) but I don't believe this is a good/usable convention so I reverted to underlines for all links
	i've included text which is only font size 1 which is normally against all my golden rules. however, this text was more of a graphical frivolity - the blocks top left and right were too dominant without anything in them and fortunately I had a couple of little frequently updated tidbits - strange facts and weird news which I wanted to include in the site somewhere. They didn't seem to fit into the blog and were a little frivolous for an entire section so this is where they ended up
	i decided to make all links open in the same window. i think i may have already mentioned my dislike of pop-ups and i think new browser windows can often be confusing. of course, if the user finds something i've pointed to more interesting than my site. who cares? good for them. this is obviously a lot more important in the business world. we need a proper web convention to identify a link which will open a new window. i'll have to remember to do some background reading on how well users deal with these different conventions
	finally. you may have noticed that there is a distinct lack of any capital letters throughout the site. this originally stemmed from beginning this site when toby was a newborn and me generally only having one hand free to type with. of course it also comes from the general sloppiness of emailing today, and besides, i was hoping it might add a hint of character to the site.