I’m planning on purchasing a website soon and I want to have a design ready before I start coding. I’ve come up with one and I have it mostly finished.
The yellow circle is a placeholder for my logo
“Home” button is an example of an active link
“Games” button is an example of a hover link
Pink text are hyperlinks
I plan to use Feeds to get the newest videos and latest news. Photoshop Project File <- Available if you want to make edits and see how they would actually look.
EDIT: I have taken some inspiration from the home page of Sponge… Sorry @Antariano
I suggest you keep the layout as it is but something that would improve the design is keeping up with the design trend. People are going for a more minimal style approach for design, by that I mean getting rid of the shadows inside the header links. Shadows that are behind the content and header background are fine.
As a suggestion, instead of attempting to develop from scratch, start of with a well-known CSS template and work from there. It will save you a lot of time in terms of the inital development and it will also mean you are more likely to make a website that complies with conventions. Example
@Kenyan I was trying to go for a sort of mix between materialistic and flat design. The header is kinda like a sheet of paper above the background, with the cut outs of the letters that allow you to see the gray background beneath it.
@popeus & @The_Doctors_Life I would really much rather start my projects from scratch, because doing that I’d know exactly what is going into it. I’m pretty OCD when it comes to code and I have my own way of doing things. Reading the pre-made HTML/CSS would take a little bit, and then I would have to re-organize it and get rid of stuff I don’t need. It just seems like more of a hassle than I want. Starting from scratch is what I would prefer.
Also, I plan to make this website basically a puzzle using PHP. Every large section is basically just going to have PHP includes.Header/Sidebars/etc.
@xxmarijnw I think it looks pretty good. I’ll probably start off using this design, and then start up a new design, working to improve things and such.
@popeus I prefer to be different, not completely, but subtly.
Photoshop/GIMP is a great way to design your site. A lot of people do it (though I personally don’t).
@MrSparkzz If you aren’t familiar with SGML markup (that being XHTML), CSS, JavaScript (or PHP); you should think about WordPress or Joomla and do it yourself instead of getting others who may or may not be unreliable.
What I have to suggest is that you research what sort of design any competition is using and what they have where. Also other sites (steer clear of large companies as most of their sites are ugly and not what you want).
Take a look at /r/Design for inspiration and /r/CrappyDesign so you know what to stay away from.
@IronManDoesMC well I haven’t had any problems listed on that page, so I’m going to continue using Photoshop for my designs. And I know I need a new font. I just couldn’t find one that matched my site well enough.
@Pink__Slime well I think it looks good and doesn’t look generic or amateurly done like portaportal.com which hasn’t changed since like 2007 or something xD.
If you need fonts I can share my library… I have near 17,000 fonts, just PM me if you want them.
Also, if you are going for a clean, modern look. I suggest using a plain white background and use a lot of black. That may not seem like a good design but if you balance it well, it can turn out beautiful.
Looking good! Also, try to take some ideas from this forum UI. Plus, grey. Not necessarily black. Try and define one light source that will cast the shadows if you really want them.
Thanks for the support! I think I’ll fix the shadow, I didn’t even realize how it didn’t make much sense. Any other ideas?
I was thinking about what I should use for my “news feed.” Something like tumblr, or maybe a blog application in cPanel. Not sure if this is your area of knowledge, but maybe someone could have some input on that.
EDIT: I could just use my forum to do the news feed just like how this site does it.
I like the twitter idea, but I’m sure sometimes I’m going to want to have more than 140 characters. I think I’ll just use my forum to prevent from having to sign up for or setup anything else.
I think I’ll fix the shadow, I didn’t even realize how it didn’t make much sense. Any other ideas?