Well, its important to put things in a solid layout. Think of blocks that make up the page. You have a block for the header. You have a block for the navigation. You have blocks for content, etc. The important thing is that these blocks need to be easily "read/seen" by the user. You can arrange the blocks in whatever fashion you want, as long as they function. So for example, the navigation bar, you could stretch it out the width of the page, and it would look "complete."
Also, think of the order of what a user will see. What will the user see first? The title is important, so make that big and easy to be seen. Then what will the user see second? Navigation is probably important. Maybe that can be second. Thus you focus on ways to make that seen second.
Anyways, because explaining such things is kind of hard, I made an image to show what I'm thinking. Just an opinion. You can use it if you want, or vomit on it. Lol.
So here's what I changed and why:
1. Made the title a little bigger. The primary title, I made bigger and solid black, for strong contrast.
2. The secondary title I made a little smaller and a lighter color, because... it's well secondary.
3. Made the navigation stretch the width of the page. It looked incomplete before. When users see the navigation bar, they will see the bar first, not the links. And after they see the links, they will know that the bar is for navigation purposes. If the bar is incomplete, it will feel weird. Or maybe I'm just too ordinary here.
4. Also continuing on the "this bar is for navigation" idea, I changed the color of the bar to something different than the header. This makes it stand out. The red might be a strong color, you could try a dark orange/brown, or yellow/green combination. Some options to work with.
5. I added a gradient behind the banner. You could probably make a solid/gradient rectangle with edges too, but I chose the gradient, because it makes it flow down from the navigation, through the banner, down to the content. Also the gradient helps in smoothing out a sharp contrast between the bright orange and red top of the page, with the white content section.
6. Content section re-arranged. Eh, just felt like "mixin' it up" Don't have to do what I did, just as long as you organize the content into some sort of organized structure. For example, bold headers helps point out a block of content and such.
Okay, well sorry if I wrote too much. I started out with a line of suggestion, then decided I might as well post the full thing, as to not leave things up to guessing.
Hope this helps.
-Deo
This post has been edited by Deomitrus: 1 Aug, 2008 - 09:59 PM
| 