New UK Mac site

[sealey]

I am currently developing a mac site aimed at mac users in the UK providing news, opinion, rumours, tutorials, downloads etc. it is still in the early stages of development but i would welcome you all to give me feedback and sugesstions of what would make a great mac site. The Forum section of my site is now fully up and running and I have started compiling a directory of other Mac sites. Still have a lot of work to do on the design, colors and layout though.

The URL is

http://www.macland.co.uk/

All feedback is appreciated.

 

[stevehaslip]

well i think its good that theres another mac site on the way up and i think its good that yo're having a go. is this your first website? it looks like you've got some good content and info but i would try not to re-write articles and stories that you can find everywhere else. if macrumors has the rumor first why am i going to go to somewhere else to read the same thing? give the stories your own spin, write about your experiences and stuff rather than the broad news that everybody sees.
as the design, you say you've got lots to work on in the design area and i'd agree. im a graphic design design student doing my degree and i really cant say that theres anything on your site that i really like. i dont really like the colour scheme, the purple is iffy and there are about 3 shades of blue/purple text. kepp it simple and use maybe 2 basic colours and keep all the text the same colour. your imac image at the top is pretty blury, and please dont ever use bevel and emboss or something similar on your text. filters and the effects in photoshop look awful and amateurish.
im not trying to flame or be harsh or anything, if it comes across that way but i was just trying to add some conrstuctive critisim.

also next time i wouldnt post the same thread in as many forums as you can.

 

[sealey]

Thankyou for your comments, all feedback is good at this stage. My expertise is more on the technical and php side of web site creation rather than the graphical side so and feedback and suggesstions are greatly appreciated. I would welcome any suggestions as to layout ideas, colour schemes and logo ideas.

Regards,

Richard Seale

 

[iJon]

maybe a different color scheme or something. it just seems like it was made in frontpage, has that look to me. the main graphic looks somewhat grainy as well, maybe a higher rez version.

iJon

 

[sealey]

New Layout

Okay, I have changed my site to have a more Mac OS X feel to it with metallic background, glass effect buttons and a white striped background for text. Still got more work to do on it but would appreciate any more feedback on how it is going. It is looking a lot more structured than it did before IMHO.

Richard Seale

www.macland.co.uk

 

[redkore]

Hi Richard,

It's looking much better!

It's clever the way you've made it look like a Finder window. If you'd like to extend that (might look silly though, don't know!), you might want to play with making your navigation buttons look more like the folders in the Finder. Also, you might take the search bar which curently forms part of your logo and use that as a search field (don't know if it's possible to customise search fields...).

The logo is cute, but it looks blurry and ragged. Try playing with the anti-aliasing on the font and pump up the jpg quality. Also, if you decide to experiment with the revised seach field, you'd probably want to remove that aspect from the logo. (BTW, you use a different logo from the rest of the site in the Forums, which are also missing the navbar.)

I personally don't like sites which root content to the top-left. Perhaps centre your content, or set it relative to the browser window.

Re. content, I think you have too many categories. I know you haven't got many items in there yet, but the differences between the cats seem a bit fine. For example, you might want to think about collapsing the Home, News, Opinion and Rumour sections into News.

Also, it's hard to work out what's the most recent news on the homepage. Perhaps use a single column, items dated, newest first.

Looks good!

 

[Danrose1977]

I think that the best thing about your site is that you spelt rumour correctly

 

[sealey]

Spelling

And there are more great British spellings to come