Ease in navigation (links, organized layout)

We found your site to be very inviting and user-friendly, in terms of both the visual design and the language. The friendly tone you established with your words felt authentic (and not heavy-handed or condescending/puffy as these so often can be).

Recommendation: You may have used a style guide, but I wasn’t able to discern (e.g., Associated Press style, Chicago Manual of Style), but be sure to use a style guide if only to keep consistent the manner in which you use words, numbers and punctuation. One thing I caught was “life style” used two ways: “life style” and “lifestyle”. There were a few other like sometimes spelling out numbers and sometimes using digits.

Recommendation: On the home page tabs, consider changing “Resources” to “Professional work”. That way it would be consistent with “Academic work” – and allows the reader to better understand at first glance what the “resources” section is all about.

High-five!: We loved the phrase “educational road trip.”

Visual appeal (font, colors, pictures, icons)

The visuals you choose made for a very strong theme – that theme (academic/education) was carried out nicely throughout the site. The large visual and brief text on the home page “invited” us in to your site. The manner in which you constructed the home page gave us a good first total picture (we could see what this was going to be all about); and the limited use of tabs made us think that this was information that was consumable. In other words, the white space, fonts, colors, and photos did not overwhelm us and discourage us from reading on.

We appreciated that you chose a modern font and used plenty of white space. As a rule, you generally want to keep the body copy the same size throughout – and have the “kerning” consistent. There were a few spaces that were out of sync with the major look.

Recommendation: Make your home page photo larger. This is all about YOU, so we would have liked to see a larger photo of your face.

Recommendation: On your “Academic work” page, it would help to make the photos the same size vertical as the paragraph they are attached to. In other words, to have the photo size match vertically the paragraph length.) For example, the “Adult Education in Prison” was a bit too large and the “Students’ Learning Assessment…” a bit too small

High-five!: Colored pencil visual was outstanding. Really drew us into the content, while providing some nice “eye candy.”

Usefulness (are relevant items included? is your bio-profile distinct?)

We felt that the endorsement section had just enough items to make it inviting and not overwhelming. Also, the diversity of people and their professions was most useful.

High-five!: We were attracted to the phrase, “Let’s chat!” and how easy you made it for the reader to contact you.

Hello, I'm Cristina Baciu

LET'S CHAT

I always welcome new ideas and feedback, so don't hesitate to get in touch!