critique needed

[dyers78]

- I have been challenged to:

"plan for drawing more visitors to our website. How can we provide some purposeful, useful information or tools that would bring visitors back on a regular basis? Is there a better layout or design that would capture our 4 focus areas and reinforce our brand? What should our goals be?"

by my boss. I am looking for any idea's or concepts that have worked for you in the past to achieve any or all of these goals. I am a one man show also in charge of all print media so I don't have tremendous amounts of time to dedicate to the site but any idea's will be apprictiated no matter how big or small they may be. I understand the soite is no completely done in CSS so please keep those comments to yourself - I am working to redesign the entire site in CSS next year. We currently average about 3900 unique visiters per month with several thousand hits. I am in a small city of about 200k people. PLease check out our site and give me some feedback.

www.unitedwayqc.org (http://www.unitedwayqc.org)

Thanks!!!!!

[xplod_ldg]

The site needs a make-over for sure. It's nice but it can be a lot better. As for having more traffic, consider telling your boss to invest some money into advertising. Good SEO always helps, too. Good luck!

[dyers78]

any suggestions as to how you would make-over the site?

[dyers78]

Anything guys and gals - I will even take the do it in CSS critiques if that is what you truly think will make the site better. I have my own idea's but I was hoping to see what the designers of the world think in comparison.

[chris_bcn]

Theres nothing wrong with it per se, but it looks and feels boxy. THe boxes also make it look like it came from a CMS template like Mambo.

The header at the top feels like an afterthought. The hues of the text and link colours makes it hard to read. The overall design lacks cohesion. There's WAY too much white space, and there's nothing that ties it together.
It doesn't look like there's any grid at work here either

Why is there a big space on the right on the internal pages? There's no side nav there, so why doesn't the text fill the space? What was the rationale behind the decision to bung the site over to the left? Centering would help eliminate the blankness issue a touch maybe.

The rotating images is really distracting - remember that web design is the business of delivering content - all that rotation does is distract the reader. At least increase the time between rotations.

The less said about the code the better I think. It's poor

[budafist]

Things that can bring visitors back to your site:
competitions, polls that change each week, newsletter links (not spam of course).

You need something on the front page that changes at least once a week. I'm quite into polls myself. And hey it's free statistic gathering of your audience!

[Crimson]

Can you lean on some designs done on the national level? I see you used some of the same color pallete with the logo and stuff. Do you have a forum? Flash games revolving around volutneering or donating time? Have you condsidered a Sitepal?

play more image on how you are helping with education,getting people back on their feet and saving kids. It looks like a annual report but not inspiring a mission to help people. I don't agree with Chris BCN so much about not rotationg things. I just think it just needs to be with purpose. However, I take Chris's meaning as function over form and content over Flash. But in a way, you want both so people will be compelled to do more.

I think you have a wonderful challenge and hope it brings out the best in your skills

[dyers78]

can explain what you mean by rotating images? Just not sure which part you ae talking about. Actually the entire site is an after thought. I was a little thing about six months ago and has just grown too fast to put thought into it, so yes, this is a huge opportunity to make this thing great.

United Way has national brand standards that are strick but have room to wiggle. For the sake of consistancy - The colors and logo placment and such will stay but I am so struggling with "cohesion" it's sick.

Thank you for your thoughts and keep them coming - I am drawing up plans as we speak.

[chris_bcn]

http://www.unitedwayqc.org/html/PowerYouth.html - for example. THe images rotate really quickly. It's very distracting

[dyers78]

ahh, got cha.

[dyers78]

any thoughts on a look something like this?
I envision the main section of that layout to change each week with whatever is going on. and those four smaller sections wil be news and updates on the particular groups activities. I'm open here

http://unitedwayqc.org/home1.gif