Thread: Basic homepage design critique

So this is my first time posting on a forum. i only ever get feedback from friends or family so i'm guessing that it would be always kinda biased. i would be grateful for your thoughts on a website concept i was creating. It is for a website that helps students with A - level maths, this is just a brief first design for the homepage. thanks, sam.

I think the design is creative and I like the desk/blackboard feel of it but I wonder if it is practical as well? Are you going to limit your content on the pages by the length of the exercise book image? And, is using graphics for buttons and other changeable items all that wise? You will be creating graphics for every section when it would be easier to do these with HTML.

Also, I'd suggest the learning pages should be a much simpler layout with plenty of white space. Learning off a screen is tough on the eyes as it is and so you want to make pages for learning as clean and uncluttered as you can.

So I like the creativity, but don't think the design is currently fit-for-purpose.

Thank for your feedback, i've never actually made a website before, i have only developed software and graphics for software so i guessed it wouldn't be very web friendly. i liked your idea of the making the learning pages easier to read also, i will definitely be using them.

thanks again, sam.

Originally Posted by Corrosive

I think the design is creative and I like the desk/blackboard feel of it but I wonder if it is practical as well? Are you going to limit your content on the pages by the length of the exercise book image? And, is using graphics for buttons and other changeable items all that wise? You will be creating graphics for every section when it would be easier to do these with HTML.

Also, I'd suggest the learning pages should be a much simpler layout with plenty of white space. Learning off a screen is tough on the eyes as it is and so you want to make pages for learning as clean and uncluttered as you can.

So I like the creativity, but don't think the design is currently fit-for-purpose.

I'd have to agree with Corrosive here, you need more whitespace - even if you ran with a slightly larger body font that could work, I think you have a nice looking start there but could really do with making it easier on the eye, I have never really liked it when I have seen a design with a notepad on it, unless it was purely visual. In this case you are using it as the main content area which makes it a little harder to read in my opinion.

i made a quick design of the page that would show the topics being explained. i tried to make more white space and an easy to read font. i'm not sure whether there's still not enough whitespace though. what do you think?

Note sure what you had planned for the large grey divider? But now in my opinion it's confusing having what seems to be two main content areas?

thanks for your reply, I was kinda in the middle of designing a faux ring binder type thing, but started to realise how much wasted space it created, so I made a new design that's live on this temporary website which i think makes better use of the limited space. what do you think?

Home - Help I took A Level Maths

Personally, it's a flash site, so I was completely turnt off straight away. This will be hard to optimise for search engines too. It seemed to take a while to load, but I guess that is due to the Moonfruit hosting.

It looks like it's the original design that you had though?

yeah i don't like that either, for the reasons you described and the fact that it won't display on iOS devices.

here is a link to one of the topic pages that i changed from the old ring binder design i posted on here.

http://hitamaths.moonfruit.com/#/indicies/4556736147

That looks much better, a lot clearer and easier to read.