view this site....help me give it flavor

[theEclipse]

I am currently designing a website that I was given some pretty tight design restrictions on, and I am looking for ideas on how to make it look well-designed, but still like their mockup. Any Ideas?

This is what I have come up with so far:

http://beingsingleis.com

un:dev
pw:!@#$

(see

http://beingsingleis.com/homepage.jpg

. That is the picture that they gave me of what they wanted, but I am told that I have some design freedom)

I am pretty new to flash, but I thought that I could spice up the page with a flash header, versus the lame text header I was given.

The website is for a book that is going to be released here in the next month or so.

Robert Carpenter
Remember....eternity is much longer than this ~80 years we will spend roaming this earth.
ô¿ô

http://www.robertcarpenter.net

 

[ChrisHunt]

Sorry, I think the "lame text header" is better than the Flash one. The trouble with animated pictures of that kind of size is that they look like banner ads, and people are increasingly adept at ignoring them.

Your banner ends up saying "Being single is NOT a disease", yet your choice of fonts and colours look, well, clinical. Look to use more pastel shades, maybe a script font for some of the headings (steer clear of comic sans though) - make it look more informal and feminine. Of course I'm having to guess what the content of the site will be - but that's the impression I get from the mock-up you were given.

I'm also guessing that the target audience of this site is not young male students. You need to find out what that target audience is and design something that appeals to them - even if you think it looks lame.

-- Chris Hunt
Webmaster & Tragedian
Extra Connections Ltd

 

[theEclipse]

Yes indeed. The target audience is single women. Thanks for the feedback.

Robert Carpenter
Remember....eternity is much longer than this ~80 years we will spend roaming this earth.
ô¿ô

http://www.robertcarpenter.net

 

[TamedTech]

Morning Rob,

Working within tight guidelines is always very tough, especialy when the client can quite often have a lack in taste and a poor understanding of what really works in a web based environment.

Last time i worked with a client that inposed design restrictions they insisted i use thier company 'brand' colours, which happened to be; Grey, Salmon and Navy Blue ... a horrible conconction lol... none the less i followed thier brief, the offending article was a pretty grim result, but the client was satisfied.

From experience when i've had clients that tried to impose design briefs was to give them examples of what i could achieve deisn wise without thier input. Trawl the net as some market research and look at other dating type sites, its a growing market and dropping a site that doesnt keep up with competitors into the market will make things a struggle.

This doesn't mean that your current design effort isnt shaping up well, it could just use a little more work.

Like Chris has commented, the navy blue is a very 'professional' type colour, and on this more informal type of site you may do better to use softer pastel shades.

Take a look at these design example from

http://www.TemplateMonster.co.uk,

not all of them are practicle but i quite often use them as my 'inspiration'. They have an entire section dedicated to 'Dating' type sites, and you'll notice they are all quite image intensive, i'm not a huge fan of image intensive sites, but if there is one area where they are acceptable it has to be dating.

You may also want to check out other major dating sites, have a look at the top few that come up when you google 'Dating', see what makes them tick.

Hope that helps buddy,

Rob

 

[theEclipse]

friends-

If you would be so kind as to check it out again, a friend and I have done abit of color and font choosing.

Thanks


Robert Carpenter
Remember....eternity is much longer than this ~80 years we will spend roaming this earth.
ô¿ô

http://www.robertcarpenter.net

 

[TamedTech]

Nicly done Rob, You're starting to progress nicly with it now, the new colours help set the scene for the type of site you're building.

What thoughts have you got in mind for spicing up that navigation list on the left hand side? and again down the bottom?

I always like just a simple text navigation down the bottom, but along the side it might be nice to have a few simple CSS effects to fill it out a little bit.

Take a look at this thread recently posted here, its got a whole host of different CSS based navigations.

http://www.tek-tips.com/viewthread.cfm?qid=1222036&page=1

Thanks,

Rob

 

[ChrisHunt]

That's much better.

I'm afraid I'm still not convinced about the Flash banner, but then I'm not keen on them in principle. As you navigate around the site, will that animation kick off afresh on every page you visit? I think that might get a little tiresome. Whatever you do, your banner needs to emphasise the "Being Single Is" bit over the "not a disease" bit. At the moment, when the animation has finished, it's not clear what the title of the site is.

I'd try working a little more colour into the rest of the page. How about...
[ul]
[li]Using the same lilac (or a slightly deeper shade) for the "Welcome" and other titles in the site.[/li]
[li]Giving the "woman of the month" panel a pale coloured background instead of/as well as a border.[/li]
[li]Making the menu options down the left a little bigger, and colouring them maybe pink or blue to complement the lilac[/li]
[/ul]
I think you should also experiment with using a very dark grey instead of black for text. Pure black on white can look quite stark.

Since you're able to use Flash, take a look at

http://www.mikeindustries.com/sifr/

for a way to use it to render article titles etc. in the font of your choice. I think it could be useful on this site.




-- Chris Hunt
Webmaster & Tragedian
Extra Connections Ltd

 

[TamedTech]

Yep i'll aggree with those Points on that Chris,

One other suggestion I would like to make, and this is only my personal preferance, it probably comes from a background in graphic design, but i'm a much bigger fan of the 'fixed width' style sites, such as the link that chris has posted, centering and fixing the width seems visualy more pleasing to me, rather than a page that adapts to the browser.

I know it's probably not 'Technicaly Correct' to do so, and i'm sure someone will have somthing to say about it lol, but that is just my personal preferance.

Thanks,

Rob

 

[Rieekan]

One more thing to bring up is that more than 25% of web users are still using a screen resolution of less than 1024x768 pixels. That would cause an issue when viewing this site as it introduces a horizontal scroll.

Just something to keep in mind.

- George

 

[TamedTech]

Also, change that @import you're using for the CSS to a standard link.

The @import loads the CSS after the rest of the page, this means once the site has grown a little, people will see a glimpse of the unformatted site before it loads the styles in.

Rob