New website design

What do you think of this design compared to the old one?

New: http://www.dannydotguitar.com/20
Old: http://www.dannydotguitar.com

[eeb]

you can't even compare the two. The first one looks awkward and kinda boring. It reminds me of one of those sketchy online music shops (you know the ones with lots of cool gear but the site looks so bad that you don't think they're legit) more than a website for a musician. The second website is balanced and well designed.. there's not info everywhere it flows really well. I'm still not convinced that it really looks like a musicians page.. (i'm guessing you're a solo artist?) It still kinda reminds me of a store but it's clean and easy on the eyes. I love how simple it is.. i wish more webpages were simple like this.. good work

[Somnium7]

Overall I think it is pretty good work. Passes W3C with flying colors too.
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=ht...Inline&group=0

As for technical stuff I might add MAP tags to describe the navigation area but that is just a formality.

Design is always somewhat subjective but here are my 2 cents. It is a clean design and quite conservative looking. I personally find it somewhat bland but that isn't a bad thing. I tend to find monochromatic color schemes boring. Things I do not like are the gradients in the graphics and the colors used for the link and link hover. The gradients in the navigation bar and page bottom might be better as clearly defined borders.

Contrast looks pretty good. Readability is very good. There's a nice professionalism to the design. I think it is a big improvement to the old one.

I'm also redesigning my site and it's high time for it to be bashed if you feel like returning the favor.

Here is the old: http://www.somnium7.com/

...and the new:
http://www.somnium7.com/newtheme

Not all of the links work just yet and the top right of the page header will have a login form later.

[eeb]

somnium


the new website is a million times better.. The only thing is the actual nav.. I'd lose the squares around the links.. and the black on purple is very tough to read.. maybe make the font a bit larger and it'll be a bit better.. The main font on the left for your paragraphs is.. well i wanna say horrible.. very hard to read.. mainly because of the all caps.. did you type with the cap locks on? Or is this font capitals only. For legibility and to make it easier on everyone out there that don't have fancy fonts use a generic sans serif font for the body text.. I know it sounds boring but it'll work. The rest of the site just looks so clean you don't want a crazy font choice to ruin it.

But after it's all said and done good work on the site.. I like it lots.

[Somnium7]

Originally Posted by eeb

somnium


the new website is a million times better.. The only thing is the actual nav.. I'd lose the squares around the links.. and the black on purple is very tough to read.. maybe make the font a bit larger and it'll be a bit better.. The main font on the left for your paragraphs is.. well i wanna say horrible.. very hard to read.. mainly because of the all caps.. did you type with the cap locks on? Or is this font capitals only. For legibility and to make it easier on everyone out there that don't have fancy fonts use a generic sans serif font for the body text.. I know it sounds boring but it'll work. The rest of the site just looks so clean you don't want a crazy font choice to ruin it.

But after it's all said and done good work on the site.. I like it lots.

Thank you eeb, I really appreciate the constructive ideas. You are right about the black on purple for the nav area it isn't very good contrast. I may try something different here. I like the squares around the links so I'll be keeping them. The font for the main page is a standard web-safe font but I am modifying it with the small-caps CSS attribute. It seems this attribute works alot better with larger font sizes like in the "See Somnium7 Live on 10-30-07" message. I'll play with this some more because I agree the readability could be better.

I'm glad you think it is an improvement as I have been working very hard on it. I, like danny.guitar, used some gradients in the graphic elements but mine have a border around them to better define the area. I just prefer the look of this better for some reason.

Thanks for the feedback. I'm so used to designing business sites I think that's why my designs all look sort of like a business site.

I really didn't want a monochrome design but I couldn't find good contrast colors (I suck real bad with colors).

The tabbed menu with hover was a pain to do in CSS. I type all my code in notepad because I'm obsessed about it being perfect and passing the W3 validation.

Anyway, this design was more of a practice one, probably going to make some changes.