Hi,
just re-designing our beachguide for 2015 from the ground up. I’ve done a jpg mockup of the first panel (it will be one of those mutiple panel type websites that you scroll to the next ‘page’)
We’ve tried to put more emphasis on the search element as this is what people will be wanting to do most. And also to entice them back by showing recent searches on the homepage to provide instant access to the beach pages on their next visit.
It looks nice - though how do you envision it being responsive? I’m curious what you will do for that. Do you have a mockup of tablet/mobile rendering?
I will say that my eyes fluttered to the top right for hte search - must be habit. Nothing major.
hi,
so for tablets (1024 x 768) it fits on the screen without a problem, although you lose a lot of the background. Mobile will need a bit more thinking though. Will have to lose the big background on a mobile to keep speed up and the menu will switch to the 3 bar menu button which lots of sites seem to use.
The logo in the top will also have a dropdown menu for our other sites so people can move between them.
I can’t decide whether to go fully https and have a panel expand with the login/register forms or send them to a secure signup area and stay http on the normal pages.
The key content areas look good, transparencies etc, concentrating on key areas.
On large screens, as per your screenshot, it looks a bit empty, perhaps make the content area a bit wider/larger for median desktop/laptop resolutions (circa 1300-1400px)?
Agreed, and there are other major issues: a site I run had endless issues with Google rankings because our content was being served in two versions: secure and non-secure, leading to duplicate content warnings.
The trend is towards full https, and the search engines seem to favor it too. My only issue with it is that it’s hard to set up and is expensive, but I’m hoping that will change dramatically this year when the Let’s Encrypt project gets off the ground.
thanks all, I’ll have a think about how to get a bit more on their without cluttering too much. I think i am more tempted to go down the page than across as widening it may give me more issues with spacing and line character length. Also forgot on this design to add a tab at the bottom to indicate there is more below.
Iam using a bit of js to scroll the page down to set ‘pages’ so by clicking a menu item or the down tab it would move a user up or down the pages.
Think from your comments i will look into fully secure and see how it affects our server performance. We’ve just bought extended validation so should get the green bar instead of just the padlock.
hmm just pondering where best to put the login/register stuff. So on the design above it is in a bar at the top and i’d planned on it expanding downwards.
Would it be better to put this at the bottom of the screen and expand upwards?
I would like to have it auto expand to entice people to join. Is this bad? we currently have a lightbox popup which i don’t like as it demands attention and i personally close them as soon as they come up. Iam thinking a slideup panel still allows the user to continue to do what they were doing as it wouldn’t cover everything. The user can then hopefully have more time to think about joining.
It’s a good start but definitely needs a lot of aesthetic improvements. I will start off by suggesting not use gradient button unless its really really good, Keep it flat solid color. Arrow icons are bit cheesy, find something simpler. Logo is not aligned in the middle (vertical) kind of touching the top and the tag line next to logo is TOO big. You need some breathing room between the logo and the menu.
cool thanks for your suggestions. Will look at a flat button. Mostly used that as we already use that on our main site.
Arrows are a bit big. have some more hand drawn looking ones i may try and might remove the one next to the donate button and resize that area a bit.
logo alignment - agreed (my bad)
The ‘tag line’ is actually the site name. So we kind of need both the MCS logo and the Goodbeachguide name on there. We just had a chat and are thinking we might try and do a combined logo rather than 2 sitting next to each other.
