: Critique: Can you provide constructive feedback for my monochrome website design? I am a programmer, design is not my forte. I attempted to create a design and am stuck on where to continue

@Welton168

Layout Thoughts

This layout may have been fine last decade, but these days it screams amateur. It doesn't take much to rearrange this layout into something neat looking, current, and dynamic. Something that will leave your customers impressed, rather than wondering whether or not to trust your service.



Faults in this Design

Cold and Dark: For a site like this, forget it. A generally positive color scheme will be far more effective in the area of gaining the trust of your visitors.

Boring Header: Let's get creative. A basic text header with an icon-free navigation on top of a simple image might be alright, but heck, you can do better, I know you can!



Design Improvement

Content is king. Everyone seems to agree. However, all of the content in the world is still shaky without a solid design to back it up. Especially for a small company or brand.

That means that you can throw in fifty great customer testimonials, but without a design that says "I'm professional, organized, and worthy of your business.", they won't matter much at all.

Suggestion:

A layout for your header that incorporates:


an enhanced, more creative version of your picture, featuring various curve and filter alterations.
a dynamically positioned setup, featuring a fixed header with a scroll-and-catch body div, stopping with the title and navigation at the top.
A full-width, light colored page without the black background.




Home





Transition (with scroll)





Catch





Conclusion

By no means do I suggest that this is the perfect layout for you, but I do implore that you Google "Best Websites 2014" and have a look at what great designers are doing in web design. It may offer you the spark of creativity needed to improve your design in a way that you like.

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@Correia448

If I were to judge the purpose of this site based on its appearance, I would say that it is a photography site. Is this what you wish to convey to your users? Yes, pretty much everyone can appreciate beautiful pictures... but unless that is what your users are coming here for, it should be deemphasized.

One thing that really stands out is that the margin to the left of your logo is noticeably larger than the margin to the right of your navigation element. If you squint (or open the full version), you can see the guides from Photoshop showing how the elements should line up with other content on the page:



Your logo should be an image. You've clearly put a lot of effort into adjusting the positioning of the elements involved, but it's just going to fall apart when someone either has a non-default font-size or is using a browser that doesn't support custom fonts. Not all browsers render custom fonts well, either. An image would eliminate all of these problems. Though if you want to allow your logo to scale gracefully, you might want to consider using an SVG.

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@Moriarity648

Go bigger. - Your text and logo get lost against that huge picture. Leave some breathing room around everything.

Don't add the CSS for the background colour to each individual element if they're all going to be the same colour. Add a gradient to the body itself, that's so subtle you don't even know it's there until it's pointed out to you.

As stated by many others though, content is king. You must understand that, and focus on it. Make sure you've got plenty of text to justify the need for 6 pages.

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