| Re: Opinions on the Site's New Look! |
Subject: Re: Opinions on the Site's New Look! by biggrizzly on 2011/1/7 15:18:41 Keep in mind that I voted that the site was great but needed a little refinement. I think you have done an absolutely awesome job of creating a great working home for us. However, as a web professional that builds online training for the military I find a few things that would get complaints from my users and those that review my training products. Important information on the front page - For some reason people will read long boring threads and other content on a website, but when it comes to administrative content like on the header of this site it usually gets overlooked. Also those that do spend the time to read it don't look at it ever again. So, that front page real estate is being used up for a new person that might be coming to the site for the first time. Therefore, I'd make some effective graphic links to the important content and make it required to see that information prior to registering for the site. Then if they chose to read it great, and then you can use that space for something more appealing to each of us that come back to the home page on a daily basis. Perhaps the daily or weekly hot threads, or a link to a member highlight section or something. The four buttons for Important links are dated and give the site a 1990s look. I'd also drop the script text for those buttons. Take a look at popular websites like Facebook and others. You won't find any more of the gel buttons or too much gradients. Most graphic designers have dropped that look for more flat images with good visible content text. Some sites will use some slight shading on buttons, but heavy gradients are out in my opinion. The other day you had a wide Guru banner at the top. I liked that. It jumped out and told me where I was. I know you have the small graphic in the upper left but I think your site deserves a bit more punch for its name. It's a great name and needs to stand out. I love the use of members cars for generation links. I also like the 30% images of the Corvettes behind the text on the home page welcome message. Additionally, I think you can scale everything down about 25 to 30 percent. I run my monitors at pretty high resolution and the text and images on the home page are still really big. You can save a lot of space there too. These comments are only my opinion and I still love the website. It's your creation and that is more than enough reason to keep things as you like them. By the way, there is so much more that I like about this Corvette site over all the others that there is not enough room here for me to list. So, keep that in mind. My few comments here are the only things that really kind of jumped out at me. Cheers and thanks for a great product. |
