Second Try

[TurtleBay]

OK, I'd like you guys to take a look at:

http://www.turtlebay.net/final/

and tell me what you think. I've been doing some reading and learning over the last week, and this is my second try. I think its substantially better than my original (www.turtlebay.net/beta/)

Thanks!
John

[Living Media]

The colourscheme is easier on the eyes - yay, except I kind of liked the blue - orange contrast. It could have used a bit less intensity and been very eyecatching - a good way to visually set your site apart from all the other designs that use gradient headers, tab navigation, and blue and purple in some combination.

The design now looks, in my minimalist opinion, too busy. there are boxes and headers and lines everywhere. Remove the sub-boxes from the content in the page body (the "Turtle Bay Powered By", the "Turtle Bay News", and the actual page content) and that will actually go a long way toward making the page less cluttered, more open-looking.

I would also remove the second line of navigation - the one at the very top of the body, the one that has the items "Home | About Us | Plans", et al. It just duplicates the sitewide nav you have in the page headers. Think about replacing this with breadcrumb navigation: that gives people a sense of context, but does not totally duplicate the menu navigation.

I would also make the textnav at the bottom of the page one line, instead of the two you currently have. That would allow you to raise the page bottom just a tad.

Once again, the content table doesn't entirely fill the page - actually, you've got the table size fixed. It's more work, but think about trying to make the table size expand and contract just a little bit with window (re)sizing. You could try the old trick of putting a very thin table row at the top, and putting in a clear .gif to keep the table to a minimum width when people resize their browser windows below 600px.

Am I correct in assuming that you are going to add details to each of the four plan boxes you have on your front page? I'm using Opera, and the boxes look large enough to accomodate another two lines of text in between the plan name and the "Order | More" links.

There's my contribution.

[TurtleBay]

1) I know that submenu is duplicate on the home page, but it will have links to subsections in other pages, so it will only duplicate on the home page.

2) If I take out the news, where do I put it? I understand what youi're saying, but I'm not a minimalist :D

3) I didn't like the blue & orange...I think these are much better...

4) I didn't want to do flexible table widths. It makes the design too difficult. I much prefer fixed-width sites. On my screen (1400x1050), unless a site has enough info to fill that width (like forums, for example), I don't like that...

5) I do like the point on the bottom links. I will probably change those to one line.

6) Yes, plan details are being finalized, and will be added shortly.

Thanks,
John

[Living Media]

On point 2), you misunderstand - or I misstated, one of the two. Don't remove the text, remove the boxes and headers, or lighten the colour of them substantially. You have enough space between the elements that either a simple thin line between the page body and the news / powered by section will set the two apart visually without being so visually busy. The client has a moment of not knowing where, exactly, to look first. This box? That box? The big block in the page center? That's why I made that suggestion.

Also, no suggestions that anyone makes are cast in stone, or have to be defended / refuted. I hope you weren't taking my comments as personal attacks. They're not - they're just my impressions and opinions.

[TurtleBay]

Oh, I see what you're saying...I misunderstood...

I know they're not in set in stone...and I know they're not personal attacks. I guess every design in the world will have its pros and cons, won't it? No such thing as pleasing everybody. :p:

Thanks for your comments and thoughts...

Anybody else?

John