party4fun.com

This is a site of some friends of mine... I've been doing the updates for them, for about a year or so now. (since the person that started it quit on them) They asked the other night at church if I would start working on a different look and gave me a rough sketch of what they wanted.
The site they have up right now really blows, and is a pain in the butt to update... and is more than likely ripped from somewhere.

please give me a few comments on the composite of the new design:

http://cbutts.com/stuff/party4fun-v01.jpg

Thanks,

I dont think the airbrushed buttons fit in too well.

Try making the navigation buttons flat. The colors are good and the layout appears to flow smoothly, I just don't like those big bevels on the navigation buttons all that much.

something about them I didn't like either

version 2 composite:

http://cbutts.com/stuff/party4fun-v02.jpg

Well I'm at my Fiancee's parent's house, and they have AOL, and apparently the parental block doesn't like your cbutts.com web address, so I'll have to look at it tomorrow when I'm home where I can look at sites with butts in them.

that's much better torn, but I noticed something else. See the "Party Themes" and "corporate events" buttons? The light source is coming from two different directions on those buttons. If you intend to keep them beveled, you may want to change that.

Yeah one is in the "down" state one is in the "up" state....thats why the light direction is different.

I'm not sure I'm going to keep them, but they want something different for those buttons to make the stand out.

Ok, I haven't got it done but I have the starting point...
check the "childrens" and "interactive" links on the right
and gimme some comments on this....

http://cbutts.com/party4fun/

Page looks very good. The only thing I dislike perhaps is the fact that the fontsize of thepopup menu (childrens / interactive) is a bit big.

K, my quick, direct commentary:
Lose the bevels entirely, you start establishing an interesting visual style up top then the bevels just ruin it IMO. I'd change the font for your nav too, it's a bit too round of a font and it's competing with the title font, arial or a simpler sans-serif would work much better, probably sized down a bit. You might just lose the round tab look completely and go with something square or at least with right angles, it's competing with the top as well. That right palette seems a bit floaty actually, not sure why. There's also a lot of unused whitespace between your text and the left nav, any reason?

Hope that helps...

Chris

looks nice, and i agree with the others, loose the bevels cause they don't fit in.. the menu on the right, the text is a little hard to read and the pop-out menu is too big to me...

other than that, no problems