Critique my new layout please

[skrlin]

It's still kinda in development and subject to change but I want to know what you guys think. All the links link back to the same page.

New design:
http://www.skrlin.com/Testing/new/site/

Current Design:
http://www.skrlin.com/

[iphong]

I dont like your color scheme that you use in the site. And the banner quite big and look empty,should smaller it,and the color of your banner must look fresher than now.Now it seems too bright i thought.

[splufdaddy]

I agree w/ Iphong, the banner seems a little too light, and it's kinda tall. The text seems slapped in there too.

I'm not a fan of the italics in the navigation, but I like the mouseover style you've chosen.

There's alot of whitespace in the design still, and the way you lay out the text is important. I would try something other than just typing one column of text the way you have. Maybe two colums of text would look better.

It's a good start, but I think there's still some work to be done.

[skrlin]

Well, everything is still in dev right now. I'm really just trying to get all the opinions I can get so that I can try to tweak out the things I was unsure about. The banner being one of them, seeing as how I whipped that out in about 5 minutes time. I just got the functionality down yesterday, and I am happy with that for now, and I am going to concentrate on working out the visual flaws. I'll keep you guys updated

Thanks for the insight guys, I appreciate it.

[JR]

there are too many bright colours, you need to stick to a colour scheme in my opinion. Also the comic sans ms font doesn't do your site any favours

[TheGAME1264]

The new site is definitely an improvement on the old site; the black text on the white is a plus and you seem to be keeping it relatively consistent (at least for the two words on every page I've seen so far.)

I like the menu on the left the way that it is, but you may want to reverse the colour scheme so it distinguishes itself from the background. You can still use the same onMouseOver (or maybe instead of grey, go with white), but the menu background itself should be a different colour.

I also agree that your header banner is too large. instead of hanning a banner per se, you may want to use a picture of a video card or some other circuit board and either fade it out or put a hue layer over it in order to lose the colour depth. When you've got that, you can use it as a tiled background and set your frame width to 100%, thus making it look better on all screen resolutions (especially high ones).

I can understand why you'd want to use frames (since they do make navigation and exterior layout easy to update); however, frames + search engines = death. You may want to look at putting your site into tables and, if you know how to do it or you know at least one programming language, use server-side includes.

[skrlin]

Originally posted by TheGAME1264
you seem to be keeping it relatively consistent (at least for the two words on every page I've seen so far.)

haha, I got a good laugh out of that. :classic:

I'm still kinda trying to decide which pages stay and go, so what's contained within isn't too much of a big deal for me right now.

As for the menu, I am working on possibly some kind of image-map interface, or at least a background image for that. I like the way it looks now, but I agree that it's not quite right the way it is now.

The banner is subject to a ton of changes right now. 'nuff said.

I think I will intend on keeping my frames layout, or possibly move to a tabled layout as you suggested. But with the framed layout, I already wrote an outside-of-the-frameset script that will redirect to the frameset and load the original page navigated to inside the frameset, that I use with my current design. So I'm kinda leaning toward that right now.

The tabled layout is something I plan on at least exploring. I use PHP / MySQL to dynamically insert the content through URL-get variables, so functionally that shouldn't be too much of a hassle.

Overall, thanks again for all the comments and suggestions. I take them all into consideration. I'll keep coming back when more changes are added. You guys have been a big help, thanks.

[TheGAME1264]

I dunno if I like the implication that my comments were made in a smartassed manner. Oh wait...they were! Never mind.

Just keep us posted. I can't speak for everyone, but I can speak for myself and probably transio (since he's got an opinion on absolutely everything ) when I say that we will continue to try and help when we can.

[skrlin]

I will definately do so, and thanks again.

I even appreciate the sarcasm. Keep it up!

[MACORA]

get rid of the frame i hate frames its kind of open and plain