[BowserYo]

All,

I am redesigning my website, hoping to get a more refined look. Please take a look at what I have drawn up in Gimp and let me know what you think. I am not sure how much I like the color. If you feel the same way and can think of a better arrangement, than please let me know. Also, please let me know your initial reaction to the site.



Thanks!
Prophet

This post has been edited by BowserYo: 04 January 2012 - 03:27 PM

[modi123_1]

Why's it so damn beige? I mean such a blah color.

The menu bar (home, about, etc) are hard to read.

No indicator what page I am on (color change one of them)

The text in the picture was a bit hard to read.

When I read "The Profit snowboarding" the first reaction was "full of hubris aren't we?" and took the site with substantially less deference.

[BowserYo]

Modi,

I appreciate your input. I have updated the template accordingly. What do you think of the colors now? Honestly I am horrible with colors...



If anyone else would like to offer suggestions, I would greatly appreciate it.

Thank you,
Prophet

[modi123_1]

better

[BowserYo]

All,

I have put the template into web form and uploaded to my domain. Please have a look at it and give any suggestions.

Webpage

Thanks!
Prophet

[Lemur]

The site is not up, or do you mean to review the link in your signature?

[revolutionx]

In terms of the actual markup, there are a few things wrong:


The main Nav should really be list items. You can add a span tag with text, and then apply a negative margin to hide them.

<table align="center"><tr><td width="1000">

Why is this surrounding the content?? You just need to add a Container div around everything. And then add the following to the container.

margin:0 auto

- and give it a width too.

[BowserYo]

When I posted the first time, I had the website in a temporary folder. I have placed it in the home directory.

http://www.prophetprojects.com/

I use a table because I have noticed that sometimes setting a div with an auto margin doesn't always center it for Internet Explorer.

As a side note, my banner images are 250>450KBs. Do you guys think they are too large?

Thanks,
Prophet

[Lemur]

The first thing I notice is that you're using way too many fonts on your site. By using many more than 2 absolute fonts and one decorative you can really hinder the retention of information on the site.

Avoid drop shadow and effects that are blatantly noticeable at all costs. The point of an effect is to accent, not detract attention from the element.

The font choice of the site is poor. Avoid sites like DaFont and other such free font services at all costs. I would stick instead to older classics and the tried and trues: Verdana, Helvetica, Georgia, Times New Romans, Arial (just to name a few.) If you want to deter from that path you need to learn typography first to know what would be appropriate.

The menu needs to have a very clear font, normally an orthodox serif or sans serif would be best. Don't make people think.

White space seems to be a prevelant issue as well. The main content area is extremely cramped and needs more space in padding as well as in line-height (the space between lines of text.) It is recommended that font sizes are kept to below 14px, normally 12 is the default.

The header needs work. The logo needs to be clean, crisp. The shadows you have on it now make it blurry. On the low res monitor I'm viewing it in, there are some spacing issues. If you're going for centering, it's currently off to the right instead of perfect center.

Using tables because you can't figure out the CSS is not a good idea. You'll never learn if you don't do things the right/hard way. Practice on things that give you difficulty, not things that you find easy. By defaulting back to tables you waste your time in learning and fall back on a crutch, this type of mentality will severely impact your future as a web designer.

Now what you're looking for in IE is a text-align:center; on the container and a return to left on the sub elements along with the 0 auto margins.

There's still quite a bit of work to be done to finish this design in my opinion.