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Design advice

Posted: Sat Jan 06, 2007 9:07 pm
by phpnewb1
Here is my first attempt at a website http://www.chattennis.com. I need design advice, critique, etc. Any advice would be much appreciated and please be brutally honest.

Posted: Sat Jan 06, 2007 10:23 pm
by Christopher
Firstly, it only displays correctly in IE. Firefox has the left column overlapping the middle and other problems. Then the site does not resize gracefully. I think specifying minimum widths would fix this.

As far as the design it is a little bland but fine. Little things like removing the letters from the logo and putting a mouth chatting (or two tennis balls chatting!?), cleaner corners ...

Posted: Sat Jan 06, 2007 10:37 pm
by phpnewb1
just fixed firefox problems

Posted: Sun Jan 07, 2007 1:08 pm
by thiscatis
It's better to have a forum integrated in a website instead of the other way around imo

Posted: Sun Jan 07, 2007 1:22 pm
by phpnewb1
what do you mean?

Posted: Sun Jan 07, 2007 3:10 pm
by Zoxive
The "Chattennis.com" graphic on the top doesn't match the color scheme at all, and ruins it.

Bevel and drop-shadow doesn't help either.

Posted: Sun Jan 07, 2007 4:48 pm
by thiscatis
phpnewb1 wrote:what do you mean?
8 menu items point to phpbb pages.
In my view of design i'd rather create a site, with full options like news management, user profiles etc..
and integrate a forum for discussion into that.

Good points:
Like the Usability
Good work for a first time mate!

Posted: Sun Jan 07, 2007 6:47 pm
by phpnewb1
Ok I changed the banner at the top to a more appropriate color and font

Posted: Sun Jan 07, 2007 8:09 pm
by feyd
Does it pass validation? Accessibility tests? Textual browsers tested?

Posted: Sun Jan 07, 2007 9:05 pm
by phpnewb1
It tentatively passed validation.

Posted: Sun Jan 07, 2007 11:18 pm
by Z3RO21

Posted: Mon Jan 08, 2007 7:06 am
by phpnewb1
thx these are some good sites.

Posted: Wed Jan 24, 2007 8:25 pm
by phpnewb1
I have changed the look of mytennis forums site a bit. I think it looks a little plain. Is there anything I can do to spice it up a little bit without overdoing it?

Posted: Thu Jan 25, 2007 7:04 am
by matthijs
I would start with 2 things:
- the header is very large. if it were a beautiful image and only on one page, that might be ok. but in this case it's a bit of a waste of screen estate, in my opinion.
- the light blue color combined with the white makes it all very cold and pale. White is not bad, but combined with light colors it is. If you'd change the blue to a darker, warmer blue it would improve a lot.

Posted: Thu Jan 25, 2007 1:47 pm
by a.heresey
Try googling for some info on color schemes. Your design as it stands now is using two colors that are very close in value and don't have a formal relationship as applied to the color wheel. Try messing around with background-color and taking putting a warm color from the red side in, like a rust orange/ clay court color. Tertiary tension. Or see how adding a dark green for an analogous approach would keep things more elegant.