jay pick

Personally I would sack the scrollbar idea off. I'd lose the thumbnails at the top and put the handwritten style logo up there, centered. Give yourself a bit of breathing space at the top of the site. Then just have a nice easing in and out slider where you currently have the large image and your navigation. Your navigation would look sweet underneath that in small, gray text. I reckon that'd look sweet. Hope this helps.

Start from scratch using Starkers theme and a coded PSD template. Get all the basics looking sick and working fine and then enhance using some custom templates and post types. Plugins come later if required.

Hi, here's my 'seedback'.. Not a bad effort at all for a first site. The code is pretty decent. Missing some meta tags in the header and a few unnecessary line breaks and tables here and there but very good on the whole. Plenty of lists, which is a good thing too. The design isn't the best I've ever seen but it does its job. Decent effort.

Hi, I have to agree with the feedback so far. A very dated-looking design. Kind of reminds me of Pacman for some reason! In terms of layout, it's pretty generic. Having had a quick glance at the code, it doesn't look too bad. There are certainly a few things you could do to tidy it up but to be honest, I'd check out the templates Lev has hooked you up with and start from scratch with a fresh, modern design. Hope this helps.

You can't be serious? Is that Comic Sans?? The graphic concept you've come up with isn't too bad, it just needs refining. Dap makes a good point: the text should ideally be on the right of the graphic to give it balance. Maybe try introducing a second colour, even if its just a lighter blue. Try Stanway and one of the links in the graphic as a different colour, so its like Stanway are the key link.. worth a go I reckon. The typography is awful. Try a nice, bold sans serif font like Arial or Helvetica. Hope this helps.

Hi Kingy, On first glance there is a lot going on for sure. I don't think the background works at all. The user focus should be directed towards the content and not the background and there is too much conflict imo. I think the page structure is all wrong. You have a welcome blurb and a twitter feed above the fold, which is ideally where you should be promoting the stuff the client intends to sell? I would have thought that showing off the tshirts would have been a priority. Things like twitter feeds are nice to have but not as the main focus on an e-commerce site. The overall finish in general is sub-standard imo. There are padding and alignment issues all over the place. Even things like styling the links in CSS so they're not default blue would be nice. An ok start, but I wouldn't be happy presenting that to a client. Hope this helps.

Hi Nathan, The 3D tank looks hectic! A couple of quick observations I think would improve the whole design: 1. Bring the navigation tabs and the 2 (currently empty) boxes at the bottom in tighter so the edges line up with the edges of the central banner. Do this with the logo as well. Place a couple of vertical guides on your PSD (assuming you're using Photoshop) to get the alignment perfect. 2. Drop the font size down on the navigation. Looks a little clunky at the minute. Squeeze them up a bit and reduce the size of the tabs too. 3. Lose the lines on the background. I reckon the lighter gray will look a lot cleaner and improve focus on the main content area. Hope this helps.

Its ok I guess, pretty basic design but does what you need it to. If you're getting good quantities of unique visitors as you say, then it can't be bad. I think it could be a lot better though. You've got a decent domain name and the videos are pretty decent too.. Maybe its time to treat all those new visitors with a design to match By the way, I'm guessing that "play andom video" is meant to be "random video"

If you're using a Mac you can download a lorem ipsum generator onto your dashboard for super fast copy and paste

No probs Lev, cheers

Hi tom, I would use flash for this personally. I've not done anything quite like this myself before but have some experience with flash. I know you can connect to a mysql database using Actionscript. Flash would certainly be most suitable for interactivity aspect of what you're trying to do anyway. Lee Brimelow is a sick individual who knows a load about flash and SDKs. Check his site out. It helped me a lot for uni projects and stuff. You might be able to get inspiration or ideas off of that. Hope this helps.

I think you've had some good feedback so far. The design is looking nice and a definite improvement on your current site. I can't help thinking that you should continue the 3 column layout in the footer..? As far as font goes, I'd probs go with the Georgia throughout, font size 1.2em and letter-spacing: 1px. That'd look sweet. Give it a go anyway see what you make of it.. Failing Georgia, there is always Garamond to have a go with.. Hope this helps.

Imo it just looks like a generic template site with little emphasis on the products you are trying to sell. This site could be for anything if all you did was change the content and a few images. It needs more impact. The colour palette is very washed out. The Royal Mail van has more impact than the main banner! My advice would be to get some moving images of the products in there and inject some colour. Hope this helps.

Not bad. I agree that you could do with adding some depth somewhere as the mass of white does look a little flat and uninspiring. There are some alignment issues with the main content area too. The content doesn't really look right on the page imo. That section needs some work. I reckon drop 10px off the intro div margin-top to start with. Gives it a little more balance. Hope this goes some way towards help..

Set the background through the CSS, so... body { background:url(images/your_background_image.gif) repeat-x } I'd take this a 1px slice from Photoshop Hope this helps

Hi Mark, I would be honest with the client and explain that the logo is really bad and that you're happy to offer a redesign. You don't always need to reinvent the wheel. If the client is happy to use the logo they supplied in the first place, then spending 10 or 15 minutes free of charge creating a new one will most likely be time well spent. Remember that the client has hired you to create their online presence and in my experience anyway, the majority of clients will value your feedback. Of course there are a few that don't. But then you just make the best of a bad logo Hope this helps.

Nice and simple, just how it should be. I don't think people are going to be doing to much reading... would probably take Lev's advice though and move the content container down a little. Text colour is fine I'd say.

I agree with alzer, drop the background image. I would also be inclined to move the twitter feed and welcome box down and get some images of the products from the shop in that space. Maybe a product slider or sliding thumbnails with a View Product button to show off the latest / best selling stuff. The twitter feed isn't all that relevant and I imagine getting people interested in buying from the shop is more important. Hope this helps.

Hi tomsel, The first thing I'd say is that the design is too dark. Its hard to decipher the text and the logo is just lost in a sea of black. Secondly the layout needs some work. Maybe swap the two elements in the header around to give it a little more balance. You would then have a more defined two column layout. I'd tone down the drop shadows too. On the whole, it's looking really dated at the moment. I suggest taking a look at some CSS gallery sites for some modern inspiration. Hope this helps.

Kingy you don't need a plugin for this dude. Plugins will just slow your loading time. I recently used this method. You only need to put a few lines of php into your themes functions.php and then add a single line of code to echo out your tweets wherever you want them to display in your page template. Easy to customise too. This guy is a sick individual! Hope this helps.

Haha good stuff

Its not going to a different page but a panel within the slider. So an anchor with an href="#5" would scroll to the panel within the slider that has that id. Not all versions of coda slider do this in the URL but still work in much the same way.

In this case, I would suggest using a sprite for the slider links. Set up the nav list as normal (<ul><li><a id>link text</a></li></ul>). Give each link an id. You can use text-indent: -99999px, which will hide text from the links and you can then set a background image (sprite) on the anchors through the CSS, using background-position for hovers etc. colinprior.co.uk has done it slightly differently by simply including an img within the anchor tags. Hope this helps.

Hi Simon, welcome to the forum

Its a good point that you raise mebo.. Just try and get the balance right I guess both sides of the debate are equally important imo. You don't want your site to look like a generic template (which many sites do at the moment) but at the same time you don't want to alienate potential clients. Hope this helps.