New Design - Your thoughts? Better ? Worse?

[bcarl314]

All,

I've been working on a new design for my business web site and was wondering if you would let me know what you think.

The old site is: http://www.aphion.com

The new design is: http://24.118.25.194/aphion/new/index.html

I know there's a minor css issue with the opacity settings (trying to make it as cross-browser as possible), but otherwise I think it's pretty good from a code perspective. I'm mostly interested in the "feeling" of the site. Is it professional, yet relaxed? What do you like? What would you change? Any thoughts are appreciated.

Thanks

[mcdougals4all]

My first impression is that the main content area might benefit from some padding especially right and left.

Otherwise nice. :thumbsup:

[bcarl314]

Good call. I upped the padding, and added a little line spacing as well. I think that does help. Thanks. Any other feedback?

[tsguitar2004]

This new design is a lot better than the old one. That shade of blue in the nav bar seems off to me, though. Maybe if it were darker to match the shade of blue on the border of the headers? Or maybe the shade of blue on the headers should be lighter to match the navigation blue. Or maybe it should be a shade of green to keep that bar green...

And why the palm trees? Just wondering if that's a branding/positioning move or just the picture you had available.

Typo I saw at first glance: the second word in the content area should be "you're" not "your." Also, you spell it "Web site" and "website" on that page. I know! It's not final content! But I just had to say it...
-ts

[bcarl314]

Those are some good points. I was thinking about making the nav bar hovers a darker blue, but that color just grew on me. I'll probably change the others to match. As far as the picture, I'll put it this way, I live in Minnesota, I took that picture this year on a vacation. No palm trees in MN. There may be certain "tax advantages" to using that picture! ;)

[Basscyst]

Hey there,

This is just a suggestion about the content on your old site. When I reviewed it before, everything looked good, and you really had me sold that Aphion is a company employing great numbers that could handle any task. (well, for the most part ;) ) Until I came accrossed your resume. Now I'm not knocking your resume at all, looks great, just that it really ,"let's the cat out of the bag" if you will that you are a smaller company, if not only one man. Doesn't really seem a point in trying to sell yourself at the same time as you are selling your company. It already goes hand and hand.

Ex. My buddy works in a shop that makes sneeze gaurds, on their site is an assembly line showing factory workers moving big sheets of glass and workers punching timeclocks etc. Were you to talk to the owner on the phone you would get the impression he is the employer of hundreds and ships out 25 sneeze gaurds a day. Really though it's 4 guys in a shop making sneeze gaurds, but he doesn't let his clients know that.

It's really all just a matter of perception. Maybe others would perceive differently, just a thought.

Basscyst

[bcarl314]

Good point, and one that I missed in the design of the old site.

I still have some reservations about the "Specials and Information" box. Any comments on that? I'm concerned that the list doesn't "fit" with the theme of the site. Also, I'm thing of adding a fading background to the h4 tag there. Any thoughts?

[ronaldb66]

It's the specials & information box that struck me as a nice touch; it sort of feels like a pull quote. It could benefit from a larger text size, though; on my default setting (IE6.0/Win) it's illegible, and one size up the body text is hit by elephantiasis.

Other than that, really nice job. Oh, I'd like to see the footer separated from the window edge at max. scroll-down, too (just like the header is up top).

[bcarl314]

Made a few minor changes for the IE crowd, those of you using Mozilla, probably saw these before. I also changed the line height and font-size on the "specials" area.

Any more feedback ???

[tsguitar2004]

I do not like the specials box as a frame with scrollbars.

I do like that the box is outlined in green. Maybe the border-bottom on those <h3>s should be that shade of green, too.

I also like the darker background color for the content area.
-ts