Stranded UK: C&C

I've started making a new website for a social event in the UK where you basically get put on a bus filled with loads of drunk people, get drunk and get driven to an unknown town/ city where you can drink more booze then stay at a hotel prepaid.

The owner of the event asked me to make him a website, this is my first design:

Stranded UK

I was hoping to get some opinions and some ideas on how it can be improved. For example I hate the neon style light bar things I put on it but without them it looks dull what can I add instead.

And he asked for me to keep the sides black, what could I do to make it look a bit less cut off.

Add a right border or something a bit out from the page content to break up the cut off, also id change Welcome to stranded and the Stranded logo to something maybe slightly brighter.

Hmmm... This looks great. Next step is to flash/css code the buttons and make them have links (If you want this to be a actual webpage/Template).

Then maybe a 1px (white/gray color) around the items (Border) before you hit the bg.

If you were just mainly screwing around and want to move to the next one thats ok too.

Ok here is how I would do it. So the guy(client) wants to have something dark? Well this kind of sucks because people tend to bore when they look to an all black website and this destroys the audience :/. Ok I will start by telling you what would be cool to change. This may be a bit radical so prepare yourself XD. Firstly the banner/image at the top is a lacks in quality of pixels XD. Dont get me wrong the idea is good but you might want to redo it and make something smoother (the guys dancing there need to have smoother edges) and also the lights and stars you might want to add something more colorful like to get in the eye of the viewer because at first I didnt even notice that the banner was there XD. Is that their official logo or thats the way the client wants to use it ? Because it looks to dark and again unnoticeable. I would try and do something lighter, colorful. (Abduzeedo | Graphic Design Inspiration and Photoshop Tutorials - this might inspire you). Now since you want to do a flash gallery (its ok I know you have the skill to do it but there are some premade awesome ones) you could use something much more fancy like cu3er, which is a growing trend in the world of webdesign. It's easy to do and the client can update his images dynamicaly just by putting them into the images folder and modify the .xml file that he gets with it. I would place it just after the menu(header - where is the logo etc.) so people get the best stuff first. Trust me its better this way than put the gallery at the bottom of the page. Maybe a longer footer would be nice too were you can put like impressions, a twitter updater sponsors (like 3 sections) and whenever design for someone you should put their copyright and than something like "Designed by Cyanoxyde" or "Powered by Cyanoxide". Well that would be all I have to say now but if you'd like more advices you know you can find me on MSN and we can talk. I hope you find these useful and not rude.

Cheers!

Andrei wrote:

Ok here is how I would do it. So the guy(client) wants to have something dark? Well this kind of sucks because people tend to bore when they look to an all black website and this destroys the audience :/. Ok I will start by telling you what would be cool to change. This may be a bit radical so prepare yourself XD. Firstly the banner/image at the top is a lacks in quality of pixels XD. Dont get me wrong the idea is good but you might want to redo it and make something smoother (the guys dancing there need to have smoother edges) and also the lights and stars you might want to add something more colorful like to get in the eye of the viewer because at first I didnt even notice that the banner was there XD. Is that their official logo or thats the way the client wants to use it ? Because it looks to dark and again unnoticeable. I would try and do something lighter, colorful. (Abduzeedo | Graphic Design Inspiration and Photoshop Tutorials - this might inspire you). Now since you want to do a flash gallery (its ok I know you have the skill to do it but there are some premade awesome ones) you could use something much more fancy like cu3er, which is a growing trend in the world of webdesign. It's easy to do and the client can update his images dynamicaly just by putting them into the images folder and modify the .xml file that he gets with it. I would place it just after the menu(header - where is the logo etc.) so people get the best stuff first. Trust me its better this way than put the gallery at the bottom of the page. Maybe a longer footer would be nice too were you can put like impressions, a twitter updater sponsors (like 3 sections) and whenever design for someone you should put their copyright and than something like "Designed by Cyanoxyde" or "Powered by Cyanoxide". Well that would be all I have to say now but if you'd like more advices you know you can find me on MSN and we can talk. I hope you find these useful and not rude.

Cheers!

Not at all, it was the exact kind of reply I was hoping for, only think I'd like to point out is I'm changing the banner anyway xD

Template looks nice. Keep adding and show us when you have banner and other shit working.

Nice colors of the bars.

I've took your advice and made some improvements, have a look and tell me what you think, I've still got some things to add like a logo and proper navigation bar but it's getting there.