Final comments on my design?

I'm ready to use a new design for my site to make it easier to navigate through it. I wanted to get your final opinions before it goes up, please take a look at let me know.

http://www.5thround.com/wordpress/

Thanks,
Tim

 

I think the main buttons are a little boring, maybe different font?

 

good point, is there a way to make them bevel out? i don't want to use graphics, i like the css style to help the load time.

 

It is wordpress, thanks for the compliment. I didn't want to use wordpress, but I think the ability to edit posts and spell check is important for ANY news site. I didn't want it to look like wordpress at all, but I wanted to use its features.

 

Looks like a magazine to me. Nice job! Doesn't look like wordpress at all.

 

Thanks, I just feel like there's 1 thing missing to make it stand out. I don't want to keep changing my layout/design every couple of months. I want one to just be the one I want to keep.

 

Nice work - it doesn't look like wordpress to me either.

2 niggles:

1. In Firefox, the '5thPage Articles' section bleeds over into the center column on the home page.

2. (this is just a personal usability thing for me) - The video in the upper right begins loading and playing as soon as I open the page. IMHO the user should decide at what point they want to use the media.

As for the buttons, on the #menu li, add to the CSS something like:

border: #FFFFFF outset;

You may have to set a height and adjust some padding/margins to get it to work right, but you can see how it works.

Hope this helps!

 

thanks for the tip. the only reason the article picture extends over is because the images are too large. when the site is 100%, it'll be the perfect size.

any other suggestions? or am i the only one that thinks something is missing.

 

is it just me or do the menu buttons have a blue gap inbetween each link? anyone know how i can get rid of that? it always happens when i try to tweak the menu.

 

if you use other color in place of blue in background it will be more attractive

 

what color did you have in mind? it was grey before and looked dull

 

i think there is far too much emtpty space.. i get lost in the empty bits between the articles..
in my opinion you need to work on a better navigation toolbar.. as it is at the moment, it appears very "thrown together real quick".. And you may want to test out the old "less is more" on the navigation bar.. personally i find it can work wonders for a site..

 

Actually I think it needs a little extra padding as it looks a bit cramped with boxes all up on top of one another in Firefox, Navigator, Opera and Safari. Looks fine in IE6 but I don't know about IE7 (boo!) as I refuse to upgrade to it.

At any rate, my advice to you would be to leave the header and navigation as it is, if possible, and to instead expand out the main content a little wider. The reason is, is that different browsers interpret values differently, like pixel values for example. So when you're designing your page look at it in different browsers as you go along.

 

looks pretty bad in opera, things overlap.

The image at the top looks squished too.

 

the overlapping will be taken care of once the site is up. the only reason it overlaps is because the images are too large.

i like the tip about the navigation bar, i just don't know what to do though.

 

Don't think of Wordpress as a limiting factor... think of it as a CMS that allows for quick deployment, a 'light' framework. As opposed to Joomla, Drupal etc. Nice work and no, it doesn't look like "WordPress". Should try featuring it on the WP homepage with some cometary on how you did it.... they are always looking for cool... could generate quite a bit of traffic... free ;-)

 

Thanks man, I appreciate it. Took some work to integrate it with the design I wanted. I really want those 2 articles on the bottom to work with wordpress too, but I can't figure that out, so I'm using a customized version of Article Manager to output those posts.