Ok, my experience with ecommerce is pretty lacking, i don't do much work on large scale projects. But this is a project i'm doing from start to finish.

 

I CANNOT get the homepage to look right, i'm trying to go for a sort of classy elegant look.

 

Here's what i've got below.

 

The one without the background strip, i feel the footer looks very out of place, the one with the background texture i feel it just looks naff, although the footer looks more in place.

 

I want you to criticise and give me suggestions links etc. etc.

 

If you think i should rethink the whole idea then say so (believe me i'm tempted).

 

It's just doing my nut in.... and this is only the index page, it just looks tacky to me ):

Ok, my experience with ecommerce is pretty lacking, i don't do much work on large scale projects. But this is a project i'm doing from start to finish.

 

I CANNOT get the homepage to look right, i'm trying to go for a sort of classy elegant look.

 

Here's what i've got below.

 

The one without the background strip, i feel the footer looks very out of place, the one with the background texture i feel it just looks naff, although the footer looks more in place.

 

I want you to criticise and give me suggestions links etc. etc.

 

If you think i should rethink the whole idea then say so (believe me i'm tempted).

 

It's just doing my nut in.... and this is only the index page, it just looks tacky to me ):

 

In all honesty I think that this actually looks very good so far, I prefer the one with the background. It does have a tacky feeling but on the other hand I think that it fits very well and is nicely done. I'm thinking that at the top of the page, where there are the links & the descriptions of the links, maybe the descriptions' font is just a little too big, and there isn't enough contrast between them and the titles. If you made the font a tad smaller or maybe if there was a pink box behind only the title, that might look good. But that's only because I'm LOOKING for a bug

Hmm :/

 

I agree with the top nav ( i don't like the fact there's only two options? )

 

Just gotta design the other pages now, and figure out which commerce package to use, speed is the most important aspect, it needs to be up and running yesterday, any suggestions? Magento i like, but it takes forever for me to theme, i've looked at the plugins for modx but really i don't think they're adequate .

looks good imo. I think your problem with the footer could be sorted by changing the font size - currently it looks like more of the main hierarchy because it shares weight/scale with the main text.

I'm not so keen on the logo either, I don't like the hand written text. Let me rephrase it, I don't like the hand written text you've chosen, it looks child like.

But other than that, I think it's pretty classy

hmm, i'll have a play around, getting it ready to launch is my main priority, graphics and stuff can be tweaked at the end.

 

I'll look for some logo inspiration, but i see what you mean.