Does my website look good?

That's a problem I think every designer has. What I like to do is send my design to a group of friends, designers and non-designers, and ask for input. It can be very helpful to get opinions of others, because as you said, sometimes you've made so many changes you can't tell anymore.

Yeah I get this problem, especially with projects I'm just building for myself. It does help, like Paul said, to get outside opinions from different places. And ask people to be critical. And not to take offence if people say they don't like it or its ugly

And Rick, don't be afraid to post your work or share your URL here as well. There are plenty of designers and devs with experience in the industry and working on lots of sites!

Thanks for the advice guys, the site is for my dad who is an author. The URL is www.richardalanbunch.com

Any advice is appreciated :)

I would definitely get rid of the scrolling sidebar.

Yeah looks good. Like Martin said, having that extra scroll bar along the left sidebar isn't the best idea. Are you using a fixed height for your main container?

Ok I had a fixed height on the homepage and the reading page, and I removed the sidebar scroll. Is there a technical reason behind not having scrolling sidebars or is it just taste?

Is there a better way to keep the sidebar and content divs the same height besides putting height:100% on both? When I do this and zoom in on the page, the text disappears in the sidebar because it doesn't scroll, and when I zoom out, the text is tiny and the height fills up the whole screen.

Thanks again for any advice.

Yeah it's mainly taste. It can cause confusion and especially on smaller resolution screens people will have to scroll quite far down your side bar.

Try not putting a height attribute at all in your css (for those elements) then the div will just stretch and shrink in height with the content.

Makes sense, thanks Brendan.

Is there an easy way to keep the sidebar div and the content div the same height? My design doesn't really allow for the two to be different heights..

Thanks.