EndangeredStories.com
Adam Forrest Shed of EndangeredStories.com commented on our FixMyUglyDesign Facebook page and asked us to review his site and offer some tips to help make it better. We really appreciated your questions and email, Adam and hope you can find some use in our advice.
We like that you’ve chosen soothing colors. Turquoise is suppose to be one of the colors that is easiest on the eyes when looking at a screen. Remember to leave a good amount of contrast for readability, but color will really set the tone of your site.
There are some things you might want to consider organizationally for your site:
- Make your contact page an actual page with a contact form as well as a link to email you. Then you can put your phone number on there and all that information is contained in one place and they can contact you in the form that is most comfortable for them.
- Consider adding a link back to your home page on the sidebar. Once you navigate away there is no way back to all that text.
- On the homepage, there is a lot of information and then an awesome picture at the bottom. Why not show your image? Make it real for site visitors and show that human element! Don’t hide it behind a wall of text. Put it up top where it will draw the reader in to the story. That’s what this is all about. Engage others in those stories!
- The footer of links doesn’t show up fully on any page except the ‘About Us’ page and the links don’t work in it. You should put those links on every page in every footer to help people get where they want to go.
- You mentioned wanting a form on the front page to encourage viewers to submit their own stories and while the stories are the most important part, you may want to reserve the first page to explain your mission and get your viewer comfortable with the site. A Reader wants to know they are in the right place before they get into specifics.
We noticed that you run your blog or “The Stories” of Endangered Stories through WordPress. Did you know that you can create your entire site in WordPress? It’s the CMS we most highly recommend because it’s so easy to use after the site is built. You can even create a site that looks nothing like a blog like http://brentfuchs.com.
Your web design right now is very traditional where your WordPress blog is more of a modern style . You might consider choosing a theme for your blog that is more consistent with your over all site. Another advantage to running your whole site through WordPress, is that the design would be perfectly consistent through your site.
Did you know that there are free themes available? It’s never as good as having one custom designed to suit your needs, but some are pretty cool. Check out Smashing Magazine’s Top 100 free themes here: http://bit.ly/1gfLNv. It’s an older blog post, but still free and still helpful.
A couple more things we noticed:
- The image in your sidebar the sunset image
has lost its original aspect ratio. That means it looks a little squished. Maybe you pulled in the side pixels more because of the shape of the area it was going into? It’s always better to crop rather squish. - The same image looks compressed. I understand compressing images for faster loading times, but there is a real art to compressing without making an image look compressed. It takes a lot of trial and error and a hard look at your image.
- The suggested reading page has a broken script.
You’ve got a great start to a great site! Keep up the hard work and you can have something really great.
It’s official, our ugly business card contest is on! During July and August, you can upload your ugly business card, or (with permission), the ugly business card of a friend. We’ll be picking what we think is the ugliest and redesigning it!