Re: Monterey Bay Area (Calif) Tutor
Hi Harry, thanks for letting us know what projects you have in mind.
I can confess now that sites like these are my least favourite and inevitably I am not in the target demographic. Any site that I see that looks like some kind of aggregator site I generally just avoid. In this case I am definitely not in the target demographic, but even if I was the design would make me walk in seconds. In addition, if I feel a website has no interest in anything else but making money from me, I walk. You can argue that any commercial website is only interested in making money, but some just scream that at the visitor.
Your websites are quite niche and I guess that your target audience may be happy to search through content to try and make money.
So that's my confession over.
In my opinion (and that's all it is), the important thing here to begin is not learning how to use Xara software, but to plan the design. Paper and pencil stuff and consider how the site will work and how it should be structured.
I'm not going to say too much here because I really would not take on a job to create a site such as this, because of my confession above, but others may wish to give recommendations.
On a very basic level the existing sites have little focus - they assault the visitor with competing 'adverts' and nothing really stands out. Usually a web page has a main focus and then a hierarchy of sections, so the visitor can easily get the main message and find the less important ones. Your sites are packed with messages.
For the Dividend Detective home page, my question is "Who the heck is Harry Domash and why should I trust him?" so I'd say something about what the site is about, who you are and why your site is the best place to be. I'd remove the vast number of links and just use the 'section headers' as links to a page relevant to that section and there you can incorporate the sub-links.
As it is, I would say the site is only for people who know what they are doing already. The home page is a bit like a 'yellow pages' phone directory.
In terms of design, I usually suggest that 'less is more' but I wouldn't know where to start here. Broad principles are to:
Reduce the number of colours and use few colours but ones that work well together. Highlighting text with a yellow background to draw attention is a waste and looks cheap (and desperate) because the rest of the page is also screaming for attention with yellow backgrounds, red blocks, etc.
If you have a crowd of people before you and they are all shouting, you can't guess who has the important message for you. They drown each other out. If the crowd has just one or two people shouting, you can get that message.
Use colour sparingly, don't think that bright colours just attract - they can also repel (or repulse ). The message is not the colour, it's the content.
Give things room to breathe. White space can be good - it makes text easier to read. Reproducing a newspaper classified section is not a good approach for a website.
So, learning the software is one thing, but the design is far more important.
Time for me to stop. It's just my opinion, others may differ.
Paul
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