Ideas for improvement

Hi, community members and reviewers,

I was working on a template with a designer which I submitted to the Site Templates category yesterday. It was hard bounced for it’s design lack of uniqueness. I suppose there is more work to do over the design part, for instance, I plan to:

- replace the standard font with some Google Font - add gradients to the footer - add 3-4 more pages - work on the styling on the long text page

However as I’m not a designer myself but a coder I would highly appreciate what else could be done to increase the chances for approval. The template is located here for preview:

I had a look in other site templates and beyond the top sellers for the week there are others which are not of a top design quality as well. More to say there are few classic minimalistic themes that play with typography only. I’ve tried to point my designer using gradients, border radiuses, some other text shadow effects, image shadows so to improve the overall feeling. It has a Nivo included (yes, too standard maybe), the documentation includes code samples and at the end it’s of course valid XHTML .

I would be grateful for any tips to improve the visual part (especially if they are frontend oriented and would not require a serious change in the design part)

Anyone? I’d really want to polish the details and submit it again, any help is highly appreciated.

Simple tips:

1. needs a lot of work
2. needs to have more options
3. needs to have hovers?
4. text as image? what is that?
5. over usage of shadows
6. needs to be better than a free template
7. final point : WOULD YOU BUY IT ?

EXTRA : Needs to be 2011 not 2000.

Never leave links the default blue color, never use a standard web font for headers, and try to make unordered lists more stylish by changing the bullet image.

3. needs to have hovers? 4. text as image? what is that?

Back to the OP.

The idea and what it could be isn’t bad, just needs some more work.

Some things I noticed, ( I only looked at the first page )

The spacing for the title on your header is off, the logo is not centered vertically.

The menu buttons are kinda ugly, the theme would probably look better without them.

The shadows under the slider and the headline are too dark. Stuff like that are to enhance other elements and shouldn’t stick out.

I’d go a little lighter with your text color. #888888 and #666666 are popular choices, maybe #242424 for something dark but not quite black.

The learn more buttons are ugly and not interactive. I’d scrap them and google css3 button generator if your stuck.

More padding overall. All of the elements are kinda crunched together. Page length is free, use as much as you need.

Add more margin/padding to the objects in your design! It looks a little bit clumpy. Good luck

fillerspace said
Never leave links the default blue color, never use a standard web font for headers, and try to make unordered lists more stylish by changing the bullet image.

Never use a standard web font for headers? Where did you come up with this one? You’re saying that using Helvetica or Arial as a heading font is not ok?

Parallelus said

fillerspace said
Never leave links the default blue color, never use a standard web font for headers, and try to make unordered lists more stylish by changing the bullet image.

Never use a standard web font for headers? Where did you come up with this one? You’re saying that using Helvetica or Arial as a heading font is not ok?

I wouldn’t use them.

ThemeProvince said

Parallelus said

fillerspace said
Never leave links the default blue color, never use a standard web font for headers, and try to make unordered lists more stylish by changing the bullet image.

Never use a standard web font for headers? Where did you come up with this one? You’re saying that using Helvetica or Arial as a heading font is not ok?

I wouldn’t use them.

That’s a mistake. There are times when it is the right thing to do and I have no problem with it when done properly. OrmanClark doesn’t seem to have a problem with it either. I think all his themes use standard web fonts for headings.

Parallelus said
OrmanClark doesn’t seem to have a problem with it either.