I have a Hugo website with a theme I created. I would like your feedback on the site. Also, do you think it would be useful to the community if I try to publish it as a theme. It is not going to be an easy task as I just kept on customizing based on my needs.
Listing some articles which use advanced features.
Wordle Daily Hints and Solutions
ChatGPT API Playground
I stopped when the cookie stuff didnāt allow me to decline all. Too much trouble to turn off all these cookies individually.
Hmm, havenāt given much thought about it. The site has Google Adsense and Google Analytics.
I used the default settings provided by Google. Based on your feedback, I added do not consent option to the pop up.
i opened the main site, seems to look nice until the ads pop up
used my mobile and these ads flood the pages with 50% space for the adds . no way to navigate ā¦ stopped
@irkode Sorry for the inconvenience. I have removed the popup ads. I had auto ads on Google AdSense enabled.
I agree with the others. Your site looks good, Iād say great even. Even though I blame the ad networks for not properly vetting ads, they maybe a turn-off for some users and dangerous to others who donāt know to look for the logos in the corners of the banners.
I turned off my adblocker for one of your pages with a download link and was immediately reminded why I run one in the first place. Because I was greeted with this ad.
Another Hugo and Adsense user, Chris Titus Tech, in a recent video of his showed his workflow of manually filtering ads and the fact that he did it every day. I guess it got so tedious to him that he decided to turn off Adsense on his site and decide to pursue other avenues of monetizing his site, such as affiliate marketing and merch. I have it embedded in one of the recent posts on my site.
I get such little traffic to my site that I host it with the cheapest option on Linode. So I never really bothered with monetizing it anyway. If I were to monetize it, Iād prefer to do affiliate marketing than adsense because I donāt want to turn users away with misdirecting ads or straight up unethical ones (some of the ads with the big Download buttons lead to straight up scams or malware).
Things I feel that you did good on, which you may be able to sell your expertise of these areas to other creators in the form of themes or consultations:
Literally not seeing anything wrong with it. One small critique would be maybe considering fingerprinting your css and js assets so web browsers donāt try to use old versions of said assets if you make changes to it. Which I had just started doing with my personal website and will do on my business site when I push my next post to it.
to the menu - when I click on a subsection I miss a reference where I am. no way to go back to the section page. maybe something like a breadcrumb will help
and more adds:
even with the above corrections on a mobile defice the first thing you see when opening a page is 50% add and in a page with 1min read time I had three of this big adds.
scrolling to the bottom opens another popup how compliant the ads are 
ā¦all that said regardless of content and layout (which is appealing) I think I wonāt read further with that many ads.
Pros: Itās very fast.
Looks okay - a bit āwideā on my 34" curved monitor for my taste, but thatās a hard thing to call.
Being a bit later than other people I can benefit from their suggestions and your changes. I didnāt notice ads and the cookie popup had a single āI do not consentā button. Nicer.
Personally, I would consider whether you need Google Analytics and actually use it. Thereās an assumption with website creators that you must have a cookie consent banner, but if youāre not tracking people or collecting information using things like GA, you donāt. (Anonymous āessentialā cookies need no approval so no consent prompt to annoy users). I trust a site that doesnāt track me more than one that does. But if you already know that and have made the choice, thatās ok.
My first thoughts, FWIW;
How is a user to know what is a link and what isnāt? Thereās nothing to provide any clues. Iād strongly consider underlining links, or at least making them all the same colour.
You have main and footer elements, but no header element for your pages. nav is not the correct element for a page banner. You should use a header element for the āNav barā with only nav links within a nav element.
You are loading a webfont just for the site logo, by the look if it. Iād use an SVG. Failing that, at least subset the font to remove the characters that you are not using.
Josefin is ānot too badā as a heading font, but for body text itās not great for reading. I disabled all webfonts, and I think it is much more readable, and nicer looking, with only system fonts.
Edit: Aplogies if my comments come across harshly; that is not how they are intended. I was trying to provide constructive feedback, but got the tone all wrong! Thereās some easy wins that can be made to performance, semantics, and a11y, IMHO.
Yes! But if only you are going to dedicate time and effort to develop, update and support it. Hugo could use more magazine style themes.
