I can't see what my website needs, help me with ideas

[cherrymuckle]

Hi everyone,

I'm more of an artist and very new to web design and I need some creative ideas/help about my website.

I'm having issues with getting my website to mesh together. A bit of background: the website is an online business magazine for MBA students. Our major area is editorial but we also have various other sections including those that are important for making us money...such as our list of business schools.

I've never designed a website before, my game is sketching and drawing etc. I've taught myself photoshop and illustrator and i'm 'getting there' with making sure all of the images on the site are clear and not fuzzy.

My main issue at this stage is coming up with a way to make the site knit together, whether it needs a set of boxes/boundaries or a more distinct set of graphic design standards, but I think it needs something and is at risk of looking like a jumble of things on the page it I'm not careful.

Normally when I'm painting I can see what else my picture needs before it's finished but with the website I'm floundering...please help me, all your suggestions and comments or some good design examples/inspirational sites would be very much appreciated.

The link to the site is: www.businessbecause.com

[CCericola]

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.

[cherrymuckle]

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

[Audentia]

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.

[digizan]

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

[cherrymuckle]

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