minamikuni

Thanks for the welcome, all!

Thanks for the comments guys. Assuming I want to stick with a more modern appearance, it sounds like I should be looking at rearranging the page elements so they're positioned more like in the owl/leaves theme, and also separating content from background more clearly. notbanksy, does your comment about the background images refer to the grey background along the left edge, the Books/More/Popular box titles, or both?

Hi, I'm working on creating a book review site, and any feedback on the layout and design would be very appreciated. The URL is: http://217.77.182.192/Pages/Home.aspx. (The actual content is temporary and due to be replaced.) I'm a coder rather than a designer, and while I think I've made a decent stab at making it look nice I don't think it manages to be as slick or professional-looking as I'd like it to. Any suggestions for ways I should improve it? As a contrast, if you log in as 'test'/'test', it'll give you a second, completely different skin that I tried with it. I'm well aware that it needs improving for accessibility standards (image alt tags, everything should work w/o JS, and so on), and should also validate (at least, as far as possible while using ASP.NET). My main concern at the moment though is the overall layout and appearance of the site, and getting the basic aesthetics up to scratch. Many thanks in advance for the help!

A quick hello: I'm a coder by trade (mainly .NET and other Microsoft stuff), starting to experiment with creating some websites in my spare time, so now I'm throwing myself into the design side of things so that I can make them look halfway decent. Looks like there's lots of useful stuff here - looking forward to learning from all the hints and tips on the site. Hope to make the acquaintance of some of you in the forums!