Review site design comment request

Hi there,

I was wondering if you guys could take a couple of minutes to check out a new review site and the design.

I want it to convey a professional, authoritive and trustworthy feel; am I succeeding or not? It uses a CMS by SoSoVN.

It is still in the design state so it is not quite 100% finished, but I would appreciate your comments; good and bad.

www.hardwareviews.com

Thank you so much,

Tony Lindskog
Shack Base

The site is alright, its not bad although there are some things I don't like, and feel that could look better.

The navigation at the top looks a bit off, and that little logo kind of feels odd there (maybe its just me, but I don't like it).

Also, the rollover color of the left-hand menu is ugly. Either the rollover color of the background needs to change, or the text-color. There needs to be more contrast in the rollover colors.

There are a bit too many colurs, but it;s still pleasant. I like it

i like the lil logo. The site as a whole certainly is coming on and is looking pretty good. The bottom half kinda reminds me of amazon.com lol i dont know why. Only complaint i have is that its pretty confused, like information and adverts seem to cross over, try defining the seperation between sections better. Also the rollovers, rollover into a bad colour, try a colour where you can still read the text underneath, the grey makes it look dirty! Nice job overall though. Thumbs up

I do like the look but I agree that the rollover colors could be better.

The rollovers are yuck Try maybe a dark orange for the hover colour?

The advertising in the header overwhelms the page, people will not be able to associate the actual name of your business/site with so much clutter in your header.

The green navigation on the right is all wrong colourwise, it should be orange or blue to go with the colour scheme you already have in place.

Put a brighter hover effect on the text navigation at the top.

Your logo is neat but the writing below it is illegible, get rid of it or make it stand out. Right now it is doing nothing other than making your site look unprofessional.

Hey there,

I think the header needs work, the light orange and the blue/white gradient don't really flow well together and it just looks messy. The rollover on the navigation is pretty pointless as it's hardly noticeable. Your logo looks like it's been stuck onto the header, gives a weird feeling. The header banner doesn't really have it's own position, it's just stuck there.

The side navigation is better but the white text for "Home" doesn't make much sense considering it's on a very light background. I prefer the blue scheme you're using for the newsletter part, that looks clean and would probably suit this site allover! The green colour used for the advertisement throws the rest of the colour scheme off.

The footer looks very templateish, not sure why the search is positioned right at the bottom of the page? Generally it should be full view the second the site loads.

The advertisements are very overwealming (not sure if this is intended or not)
and tend to grab my attention as opposed to reading the content.

How about now with some updates and some articles to display.

I am using News Express which IMHO one of the best commercial CMS out there but unfortunately the default and sofar only template is hard to modify.

--Tone

Your buttons on the left hand side are hard to read in the mouse over state, all of them except the cell phone button. Other than that a great looking site.

do you mean the menu? I will work on the mouse over coloring today and I am moving the search button up but I keep getting errors so I had to contact support to see what they could do to help me out.

Thank you guys for the input, please keep them comming.

--Tone