Did a Redesign Your Thoughts

[Ridge]

Ok, honest review time and I have to say I love the content of the new stories and I am a reader of your site. Glad to see its finally being re-designed. Ok, here goes!

I love the header, and that's about it. The massive mix of color just hurts my eyes. You have a few shades of blue, some yellow, some red, some black, and it looks like someone tried to use some type of gradient effect and it fails bad int he top nav bar.

The left sidebar has a ton of text, I am assumed at first you were doing that for SEO purposes and linking to some important pages, but at second glance those are outgoing links. Its possible you maybe have a good CT ratio there, but my instincts tell me otherwise. Mainly because the links are not CTA's but just room names linked. I think you can make better use of your space there in any case.

The Big Issue

Tons of Marketing studies have been done on people's habits when reading books. I'll have to find the articles eventually and re-read them, but the research lead to short and fat paperback books.

The issue they found was that people often times felt intimidated by the long and wide hard cover books as opposed to the paperback versions which "seemed" shorter. Of course there is a big debate on this, as some people felt paperbacks were "beneath" them lol.

Anyway, I think the big issue is your site is too damn wide! You have some awesome news stories on there, but the headlines are link text and its hard to see what the topic is about IMO - Plus the layout isn't great of the articles, it just looks outdated.

Newspaper owners found out years ago that "Big Bold Headlines" sells papers. Your goal is to catch their eye and get them reading (or clicking)

Finally, I think you need to check out your coding - It seems you have a massive amount of code back there and I bet your code to text ratio is very lopsided. Just a thought and I know that is probably not a huge deal, but ya know.

[doovde]

Honestly it confuses the crap outta me. I don't know where to look or what to look at. There has to be a better way to display poker news than that. I don't think the colour scheme works together and Randy is correct when he said it's too wide.

If you can afford it why not get Eduardo on the case. He could sort that out pretty quick and have your site looking 100000000000 x better.

[Matt Geer]

If you want my brutally honest opinion, I don't like it at all. Here are my major issues:
- The design would be okay if this was 3 years ago. It has a very outdated look to it.
Honestly, I don't think there is an easy fix. If you want it to look really good your going to need to start from scratch with a better designer.

Those were my exact thoughts as well. (I wasn't around 3 years ago but I've seen a similar generic looking template floating around) The green template was loads better.

I don't even know where to start honestly. I don't care for the design and whoever chopped/coded it did a poor job as well in my opinion.

I would scrap it and start over. Maybe have a template done and before it's coded throw the jpg image up here for everyone to see.

[Randy Ray]

I'm with Graham and Matt. Start over.

[jdwanchalk]

I still think the general color scheme looks good, but obviously it is really drawn out otherwise with no focus.

[Lenny]

Ty to all.

If someone can send me over Eduardos contact info it will be appreciated.

[doovde]

I've PM'ed you his skype but theres also his webiste Graphic Design - Eyenod Studios