I don't like the colors used under the BUSINESS SCHOOL CONTRIBUTORS section, they just don't fit.

I would change to body copy to a san-serif font. Serif fonts are the best to use in body copy in print but san-serif fonts are easier to read on a computer screen.

Thanks CCericola, I agree that the contributors section needs some more work...watch this space! Cherry

It seems very busy to me and took me a few moments to figure out what it was for.
I would suggest that your very important tagline " the magazine about business students around the world" should go with Business Because or be more prevalent so that people know what they are looking at right away.

And is all that clutter on the front page needed? I think you are going for a newspaper look... but newspapers work with that because you can scan the headlines easily... if your case I feel like there are too many sections and it's hard to scan.

However on a quick glance it looks like you have the sections well thought out.

Working from the top down:

Main slideshow - I'd use a "carousel" type presentation that will get rid of the distracting thumbnails on the right, but still let users easily cycle through the different articles. See the Washington Post and NY Daily News home pages. The NY Daily News implementation is too busy for my taste because of the text overlaying the photos, but you could always leave that off.

Everything under the main slideshow - There's little visual hierarchy here (other than the obvious presented order) to indicate which articles are more important. Take a look at the NY Times, CNN, and Wall St. Journal home pages—you can tell right away which ones are most important by the size of the headings, the size of the images (if any), and the placement. The human eye naturally travels from the top left towards the bottom right unless something stops it—use that to your advantage. Try to keep the really important stuff above the fold.

Business School Contributors - The colors of the banners are really loud & distracting to me, and they're not in keeping with the more "serious" main color scheme. Using all capital letters makes them difficult to read, and the fact that the text is an image isn't good either. I'd put each person's photo in a rounded-corner box and then put the rest of the info to the left (see below) in actual text that search engines can pick up. You could even make the boxes smaller and have the people sort of breaking out of it the way they break out of the banner behind them now. Keeping a consistency format and avoiding all caps will also give you more room for future contributors who may have longer names/locations.



For someone new to web design, you've done a pretty good job so far. As Audentia said, it seems like you've thought out your sections well, so now it's just a matter of tweaking the presentation to provide more consistency & the visual hierarchy necessasry to make the content easier to scan.

I'd like to give you feedback on the rest of the site, but I have to get back to work. I hope that helps a little.

Digi

Thanks for this digizan, I'm going to re-think the contributors section, and I really like your proposed layout. Thanks!