Thread: Outstanding Writer

I've just recently redesigned Outstanding Writer. Please let me know what you think and if you happen to have any bugs/errors in browsers let me know that as well!

http://outstandingwriter.com/

Hi,

To be honest I really did not like the color scheme, too dull (This may be just me).

Some pointers:

-http://imgur.com/ge83d.jpg
-The tabs (about, hire me etc) are unevenly placed.
-I think you should break the posts on the homepage, this may just help increase comments too and it will make the page shorter and decrease load time.
-The sign up button is bigger than the email box, this could be improved.

The rest rocks!

Hey Corey, nice design, definately an improvement on the old one. Here's my suggestions:

- As Farrhad says, it's a bit dull. I really like the main colours, but I think you should make the wood background a bit lighter.
- I don't like the tabs at the top. I think the rest of the design looks really sophisticated, and that looks childlike. Doesn't fit in.
- Only show excerpts rather than the whole post. I mean, if I was going through your blog for an article to read, I'd much rather only see the first 100 words or so of the article and then carry on if I like it.
- Give away free advertising. I think at the moment it looks very bad on your site that you have 3 empty blocks, so put some affiliate banners there, or give them away in a mini contest and get some traffic as well. That said, only give away 2 blocks, as I think you should still have one 'advertise here'.

Hope that helped a bit

Originally Posted by Farrhad A

Hi,
To be honest I really did not like the color scheme, too dull (This may be just me).

I'm actually finding it kind of boring as well, haha. I think maybe the colors need to be more vibrant and the textures better? As I said in MSN, I kind of just stumble into colors

Originally Posted by Farrhad A

Some pointers:

-http://imgur.com/ge83d.jpg
-The tabs (about, hire me etc) are unevenly placed.
-I think you should break the posts on the homepage, this may just help increase comments too and it will make the page shorter and decrease load time.
-The sign up button is bigger than the email box, this could be improved.

The rest rocks!

1) Not sure why that keeps happening. Possibly a CSS float thing? Are you using IE?
2) Never done tabbed navigation before, so I'm working on it. Need to find a tutorial...
3) I can dig it. My long posts are probably killing load times.
4) I'll shrink it. Never horizontally aligned a form before either, haha.

Originally Posted by Simon

Hey Corey, nice design, definitely an improvement on the old one.

Thanks! I didn't want to start completely from scratch but rather build upon the previous one. Hopefully that worked?

Originally Posted by Simon

Here's my suggestions:

- As Farrhad says, it's a bit dull. I really like the main colours, but I think you should make the wood background a bit lighter.
- I don't like the tabs at the top. I think the rest of the design looks really sophisticated, and that looks childlike. Doesn't fit in.
- Only show excerpts rather than the whole post. I mean, if I was going through your blog for an article to read, I'd much rather only see the first 100 words or so of the article and then carry on if I like it.
- Give away free advertising. I think at the moment it looks very bad on your site that you have 3 empty blocks, so put some affiliate banners there, or give them away in a mini contest and get some traffic as well. That said, only give away 2 blocks, as I think you should still have one 'advertise here'.

Hope that helped a bit

1) I'll look into switching up the colors a bit. I think I know which parts you're addressing.
2) I was going for a kind of portfolio kind of feel. Got the idea from the newest elegant theme (ebusiness). I'll try adding a texture and changing the color and see if it looks better like that. If not...new navigation!
3) I'll do that. Should I use thumbnails?
4) Those were just for positioning :P I'll put up some affiliate ads as soon as I fix up the positions.

---

Thanks for the great comments guys! I'll work on the changes and get back to you.

Regarding the excerpts point, try using teasers if you can. For me, they're by far the best way of demonstrating your posts on the homepage. I'll just get a screenshot of what I mean and upload it to this post.

EDIT: Here you go, taken from www.blogussion.com

I was using Chrome.
And the overall design is really good, just the colors need to be vibrant

If you can't find a good tutorial let me know, I'll look for one.

Cheers!

Alrighty I've made some updates. Things that DID NOT change:

advertise here banners
colors

I've managed to fix the alignment issues, I believe, so please let me know what to improve upon. Suggestions that would be awesome:

1) Should I come up with a new logo? If so, how?
2) How should the newsletter bar be styled?
3) Should anything be added to the footer?

1) Logo rocks. Simplicity is good.
3) You can add a Twitter thing, a brief about paragraph.

Corey, that looks SO much better

I love the boxes you've used for the excepts: they blend in nicely and are very subtle... nice work! Also, those tabs look a LOT better than they did.

Regarding the logo, I quite like it. The whole website is quite minimalist (which I like), so it seems right that the logo should suit it. No need for change in that department IMO.

To the footer, yeah, you could do something about it. The page just seems to stop, and, in my opinion, it would look better with more stuff in. One of the best footers I've ever seen is www.Asnio.com - it has good info, but also blends nicely into the bottom of the page rather than a blunt stop.

Originally Posted by Simon

Corey, that looks SO much better

I love the boxes you've used for the excepts: they blend in nicely and are very subtle... nice work! Also, those tabs look a LOT better than they did.

Regarding the logo, I quite like it. The whole website is quite minimalist (which I like), so it seems right that the logo should suit it. No need for change in that department IMO.

To the footer, yeah, you could do something about it. The page just seems to stop, and, in my opinion, it would look better with more stuff in. One of the best footers I've ever seen is www.Asnio.com - it has good info, but also blends nicely into the bottom of the page rather than a blunt stop.

Thanks for the link. I'll try making a better footer. I made the background slightly darker than the one that was there. Looks warmer now, me thinks. Not sure about the brown for the header...