Your opinions or suggestions on my site

[Rik]

Hi All.

First try designing a web site using Xara.
The menus are not yet working because I have not done the other pages yet.

Please let me know what you thing of it so far?

OSCAR User

[Drwyd]

Hi Rik

The panel with the newspaper seems to be trying to distance itself from the menu.

That orange in the logo jars a little with the grey. Maybe use a darker grey.

Other than that it's coming along nicely

[Rik]

OK Drwyd.

I shall try a darker background.

I'm not sure what you mean when you say that the newspaper seems to be trying to distance itself from the menu?

Cheers for your comments, so far.

[Drwyd]

I'm not sure what you mean when you say that the newspaper seems to be trying to distance itself from the menu?

The centre panel has a larger gap between it and the menu than the gap between it and everything else

The greys you used on your original were just right. This version seems to have lost some punch.

[Rik]

I can see what you mean about the original having a bit of punch when it was all darker.

But, I couldn't get the rest to work as I wanted.

So, I'm trying a very light background.
Does it look worst now?

[Drwyd]

It does take some of the sting out of the orange. What about a gradient page background ?

[DaveC]

Just a few passing comments:
I find the site a bit cold. Possibly the gray shading suggested would help. The white is awfully WHITE! My site is totally unlike yours but I have a graduated background you could look at: ptolemeeplus.ca/triphotos/France2011

I realize the content is only provisional but you have repeated the same content three times. Might be better (as mentioned) to explain a bit more exactly what you are offering. Small error in the second line of text: the verb should be "shows".

If you spread the button box to the left you can integrate the middle (newspaper) box a bit better.

I hope this is of some help, DaveC

[Rik]

Hi Dave.

Thanks for your input and thanks for spotting the grammatical error!

The reason why it's all WHITE, is that if you go to the 'Sidepanel' page, that's a set of pages that I've copied from the magazine the sales people can download and print. The magazine is done with white pages so that it's not too heavy on printer ink etc...
To save a ton of work, if I am going to copy pages from the magazine and put them up on the web site, then things need to be white(ish).

That's not to say that I don't understand what you mean by everything being all white.

I also understand things being repeated.
I will probably remove some of the repetition in time, but initially, I want them to be able to get to pages that explain what's changed from a number of places.

The bit about what I'm offering (to be more accurate, what OSCAR offers) is something that I need to work on. That's for sure and I just haven't got there yet.
What is being offered, however, is not too critical. Those who are visiting the site have already been trained by me and are there just to remind themselves of what they may have forgotten etc...

But, I am not pretending that I've got everything worked out perfectly, by the way.

[DaveC]

I completely understand your thing about printing and ink cost and it's obviously what works best for you. But a light shading might help set off the foreground from the background. Good luck!