I am in the process of designing a website for a friend, and we had so differences in opinion over how the website should look. He continually insists that the background is too flashy, while I preferred it stayed the way I made it. Does anybody have any suggestions on how the design could be rectified?

This is a common issue I see.

 

You know it looks better and that users would like it more (from your design experience) but the CLIENT and that's what your friend is (even if you are doing this for free) wants something different, perhaps more inline with the brand they will be looking for etc.

 

IMO you should create the site to the spec that your friend has given and make him happy despite thinking it looks better with the background in

i personally dont like the background, the lines are too distracting and makes the site look like there is little/no structure

Do you have any recommendations on what the background should look like?

You can do one thing if you want to keep this background change the color and transperancy ratio of the menu and the form...it might suite with it

Moving on from the background (I assume you want advice on everything), the font is, for lack of a nicer word, horrid. I'm not sure if you put much effort into it, but blocky fonts aren't terrifically modern. I'd head back to the drawing board on that part.

Change the background to whatever you want, the design will still suffer.

• No logo, or site name?
• The navigation is massive for four standard top-level pages.
• The alignment of everything is way off. Your nav has tonnes of left padding, your slider thing is aligned right, the image has different padding to the nav, ect. It just feels wrong.
• Whilst the fonts don't look great, there also isn't any sense of hierarchy between elements. Headings are hard to distinguish from each other (typically the main heading has more emphasis), the paragraph is difficult to read / needs improvements on the line height and font weight. I wouldn't recommend having entire paragraphs in bold.
• Links, all your text is the same colour and weight. How do I know what is clickable and what isn't. It would be nice to get a few different link styles on there.

Take a look at this Medium article. They do a great job of displaying content, headings have emphasis, subheadings have less emphasis, paragraphs are easy to read, bold is used very subtly to highlight particular words or phrases, lists are indented correctly and quotes can be properly distinguished. The list goes on.