First Web Design!

[minneola24]

This person was interested in having web design done and I was going to outsource it but decided to give it a shit (never done web before, only logos) so here is what I have. It is in an upper class beach city so I needed to make it a little elegant, it is for a fitness place club. Any suggestions? Thank you.

EDIT: For some reason the image isnt showing 100% on the forum so its a tad bit blurry, you might have to right click it and go to view image, sorry!

http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/729931/New%20Logos/La%20Jolla%20Club/home.jpg

[vibrant_echo]

Aesthetically, it's a huge, giant, fantastic improvement over their current site, that's for sure. ;)

[minneola24]

Aesthetically, it's a huge, giant, fantastic improvement over their current site, that's for sure. ;)

Thanks, you must have seen their flash site from google? I'm glad to hear that! I haven't showed them yet but i'm going to give it to them to see for free and ask if they want me to add more pages and get it coded.

[vanishdesign]

It doesn't seem like a whole lot has changed. The biggest problem with the current site is the flash intro, which is made worse by not having a 'skip intro' button.

You got rid of the phone number, address and the current promotion. Ask yourself what are you improving about the site other than the look of it? How are you making the site easier to use? The font remains just as small, though screen sizes have probably increased since the site was first designed. Instead of white text against a grey overlay, we've got greyish green text against a light green. And the content is still relatively buried, relying on unnecessary action from the user.

Why is the heading "Mission Statement" needed? It's such a business term that most potential customers are not really going to care about it. Why is the mission statement needed at all?

Springing the design on them doesn't seem like a good idea. A redesign needs to involve the client. They should have some idea of what's wrong with the current site - maybe they've received criticism or complaints from users, or maybe their old site was done on a small budget and they had more ideas for different content.

[kevincdg]

agree with everything our austin web designer said.

also, from a critique point of view, you might want to throw in an accent color somewhere. i feel like it could use a little punch.

also, i think the "footer" is too cramped. i could do with some more spacing or maybe a smaller/different font or footer treatment. it looks like you ran out of ideas and were bored once the footer came, so you did the simplest thing possible (one of the most common web design pitfalls i think)

definitely not bad for a first though, although i don't know about your business strategy behind it...=X

[Audentia]

The overall look is clean and nice. However I agree with vanish, why hide the contact info. I bet more than 50% of the people going to that page just need a phone number.

I think the text in the mission statement and hours is a bit hard to read. I'd try a white on that background and see if that makes it better. Remember people don't like to try too hard to read things on the web.

There is a great improvement here over their current. So nice job there.

[minneola24]

Thanks everyone, here is a revised version with the adress + phone number and I also made it easier to read the text.

http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/729931/New%20Logos/La%20Jolla%20Club/home.jpg