[storer]

Hi everyone,

At the moment I am developing a site out of my own personal interests. It is going ok, however... every time I look at the homepage, I think something is missing. None of the links, except for forums, work on the site. Could you just tell me what you think and what I could improve?

It is www.dd.illusionfxnet.com

Thanks,
Storer

[Tyler Dockery]

You may simply wish to touch it up some.

You have a great background color. Why fill your table with white? I say you should stay with that.

Your top images are not centered within the white. They however are not far enough to one side either, so it gives the feeling of trying to be centered, but not making it.

The personal interests which you have (probably computers, film, dance/ photography/ performance) don't come across strongly enough yet.

Your site uses some great electric blues. Why not substitute them for the black borders you have?

You site seems very centered, except for the blue boxes on the sides. Perhaps some color bars or images coming down the sides?

Your Forum Page looks great. You should strive to make your main page / splash page look closer to those designs. <<Or, make your forum page more like your front page>>

hope that is helpful.

http://dockerydesigns.50megs.com

[godzookie2k]

yeah, but black and orange is such a passe color pallet. I'll be honest, I don't think you're using the space effectively, everything is so center aligned and wasting so much space around the edges, not using the negative space effectively. With the main content center aligned and the header left aligned everything goes wonk. Your navbar text isn't centered either. The "revereor" titleat the top is all kinds of pixellated and gunky looking, clean that up and put less compression. I'd also hose the beveled squares, they don't fit in at all. Decide on a header type color and size, decide on body copy type color and size, and a link color and stick to it, make sure the colors work together too, the blue copy and the blue headers are really hard to read on the white, and the white copy on the orange is REALLY hard to read, and the red link colors really kind of stick out, in a bad way. The "board statistics" and "users online" boxes look way too small, at least in my browser.

Lastly your code is a mess, you've got font tags mixed in with css mixed in with tables, no classes anywhere, and your font families are only verdana, instead of verdana, helvetica, sans-serif which will result badly when viewed on other browsers if the end user doesn't have verdana. Also some of your tables have unclosed font tags, and you have css styles inside of font tags or something. Also your page is missing a doctype.

I'm not one of those who'll give you static for using tables instead of css or anything, I don't care how you lay it out, but at least use classes instead of doing everything inline, it'll make your life easier and make the page lighter. And at least try to use less inline tables, it looks like a tangled mess in there.


(this all just applies to the frontpage btw)

[moonmonkey]

I would loose the blue bevelled boxes at the top, or at least loose the bevels (stop them looking like blue bevelled squares)

Use some more subtle outlines and think about making the menus stand out from the rest of the content, think shadows or outlines.

Increase the text size point or two.

Groups similar items together eg. board statisics and users online.

There is no need for the page to be symmetrical, but it should have a focus.

Think in thirds.

Stick a return carriage under the footer.

I like it! good luck.

[storer]

Thanks guys! Its been up here for a week or two now so finally someone posted in it! LOL

About the code being a mess, I didn't type it myself, I used dreamweaver. Do you know where I could go to find out how to clean it up a bit or how I could learn how to lay it out with CSS?

About the blue stats boxes, they are bugging me too! I am still trying to figure out what to do with them. And I will eventually change the forum skin.

I'll also have a play with the colours!

The header is in production, because I am unsure about naming. Some people said >revereor is impractical and I should rename it, but others have said keep it. What do you guys think?