How's My Web Design Look?

Question

http://www.invisionblue.com I redesigned my company website, it took about 7 days to do and I opened it up last night. How's it look?

Answer 1

I'll start with the positive:

Your use of the grid system is effective. The visual language communicates your content breakdown without too much confusion. The use of the yellow to differentiate the starting point is a nice usability touch.

The site also works well in most major browsers without significant visual differences. A consistent experience across platforms is always a great thing - be proud! Don't get too worried about other suggestions to rework your code with XHTML strict and CSS - the most important thing is that it works, not whether you are following standards. (Standards can definitely help things to work more properly, but don't fix what's not broken)

I do see a few issues:

First, your color scheme does not seem to fit with the purpose of the site. Primary colors like bright blues, yellows and reds are employed to attract people who are not very educated or cultured. This is why stores like Wal-Mart use these colors. Upscale establishments use more sophisticated color schemes, muted colors and the like. I do not think that the majority of your intended audience falls in the prior category. You could fix this by reworking your blues to be more subtle.

The blue also fails as a design aspect because it pulls away from the content. A good example of where this is especially bad is on the solutions/design page. The intense blue background between content areas pulls the eye away from the content. Every aspect of your design should lead the eye across and down your content, making your users *want* to read it.

Your navigation is confusing. Without a deeper investigation of the context of each of your two navigation bars, there is no way to tell which one is the primary navigation. This is visually confusing - users do not want to have to *read* all of the options to figure out what to click, they want to *scan*. Scanning is only possible when your design communicates effectively.

Your typography is a little disjointed. There is no clear hierarchy between more important and less important text.

If you have any more questions, feel free to shoot me an e-mail through my profile page. I've been doing UI design and development for many years, for some of the most recognizable companies in the world, so I've got some experience.

Answer 2

Suggestions:
(1) Print a bit small (perhaps that is the "popular" size these days, I guess that is the same size Yahoo! answers uses...)
(2) Upgrade to XHTML 1.1, with off-page CSS (thus faster loading page, with no bandwidth slowdown necessitated by such things as repeated download of text strings such as "bgcolor= ..." )
(3) Perhaps a little less crowding on the home page? (Personal taste, maybe this is not shared by others...)

Answer 3

Some of the blues in the background do not match the blues in your header and body.

Just an opinion

Answer 4

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Henry

Answer 5

It looks good to me.