Website Redesign

K

Krysm

Junior Member
Im currently in the process of redesigning my website (Teenuz) after many visitors felt it's current appearance was a bit too bright and childish looking, when it's meant to be aimed at a mature, teenage audience.

Basically, this site is a news website with a difference. All the content is user-generated and in return they earn tokens which can be redeemed for rewards in our store. Sorta like Newsvine, but aimed at a teenage audience.

Anyway, over the past week or two i've gone through a few redesigns, trying to make it seem a lot more polished and mature. What you see below is the 3rd version of this planned redesign. Im now seeking a lot of feedback so I can improve it before I begin to code it.

I highly appreciate any advice/feedback given :)

teenuzlayout3.png
 
Hi Krysm,

Not a bad start, it looks a bit dull though. I know it can be really hard sometimes, but maybe try to inject some more personality into it?

The menu is really hard to see, so perhaps you could make it a bit darker. Maybe also design the content a bit more. Add some imagery and work on the Typography. The line height needs increasing, and it looks like you've got anti-aliasing on the body text. Set that to "none" (or use custom anti-aliasing if you're using Fireworks) as you'll get closer to how the text will actually look on the web.

What are the small arrows in the menu for, are you going to have it sliding left/right? Maybe drop downs would work better so that people have a full overview of the navigation from the start?

Sorry not the best feedback in the world, but I'm shattered :)

Keep us posted on your progress!
 
Okay, after tinkering about a bit, ive coded most of the layout. You can find it here;

Teenuz

None of the links work, but it's a start. I have been looking into ways to give a bit of a personality boost such as overlaying a grunge, graffiti-esque texture/brush over the top section of the layout and ill try and incorporate that within the next few days. I've also made the menu text darker. As for the menu itself, i've decided to keep it as it is. Im not a big fan of dropdown/overlaying menu's if im honest, and I feel that keeping it as a scrolling one would make it a lot tidier looking.

I wasn't too sure what you meant by improving the content? D'you have any ideas how I could improve it?

Once again, thanks for your feedback. It's been really helpful :)
 
Krysm said:
I wasn't too sure what you meant by improving the content? D'you have any ideas how I could improve it?

Once again, thanks for your feedback. It's been really helpful :)
Click to expand...

What I mean is that content is one of the most (if not the most) important things on a website. The design around it is secondary, and should just work as an enhancer and compliment the content. If you think about it, when you visit most websites (especially more content driven websites like your own), you don't go there to look at the design. Maybe the first time you'll have a look at it, but after that it falls in to the background and it's the content you're there for. Good design is invisible.

So what I mean is pay a lot of attention to how you lay out your content. Line-height in the text, hierarchy, typography, readability, letter-spacing, information architecture, flow, call to actions, imagery with impact etc etc. All that is part of a web design as well, not just the header and graphical elements.

Hope that helps in some way!

Thanks!
Soren
 
Thank you very much for that advice Soren :]

Over the last few days i've finished putting the rest of the site together and trying to improve the content as much as possible. I've now placed the site at Teenuz as I get it ready to open it to the public. Everything functions apart from the 'get started' button. D'you think there's anything I could improve upon?

Thanks again for your help so far. Much appreciated ^_^
 
1 Thing I picked up on was the tables..maybe drop the tables and use some div classes to replacew them buddy
 
Hi Krysm,

No problem. Just happy to help. That's what we're here for. :)

Looks better with the separators. I'd really introduce some imagery in the blog posts though, especially when you have different categories. Here is an example of what I mean. Not saying you have to do it like that, be creative here, but adding an image to each blog entry in some way can generate a lot more interest in the article and draw the user in.

You could also introduce some color codes or something else to differentiate the categories more, but just an image could do the trick. The first article is about Football, and the next one about Steam/Gaming, but they look the same which seems confusing.

I'd increase the line-height in the body text slightly and perhaps look at making the text a tad bigger. For me, the posts are not as easy to read as they could be which is important on a news site. Using the above example again you'll notice how the bigger line-height makes the text easier to read.

I'm not going to get into the coding of the site, but as Glen mentioned, you should definitely get rid of those tables.

Hope that helps!

Thanks
Soren
 
Okay, i've worked on the layout slightly.

I've tried fiddling with the current images in the posts but it's really challenging to do through our news system. As for the categories, i've created header banners in each news topic but im also looking into styling the category titles in each post a different colour. I've also increased the line-height & font size in the body text which I agree with you, it does vastly improve them. And finally i've recoded the top portion of the website and removed all tables. Unfortunately, im still pestered by this horizontal scrollbar that's been appearing so i've had to disable it in the meantime. The slightly edited site can be found at Teenuz

Is there anything else I could improve upon? Sorry if this post doesn't make much sense, it's been a long, exhausting day :(
 
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