Site Suggestions for new redesign

:confused: http://www.chillicothe.com

Hi I am redesigning our site and i just wanted some suggestions on what i should do for the look of the site. This site is for our local city Chillicothe. We have decided to do a new look. We want it to be a fluid site, 100%. We have to keep the logo Chillicothe.com with the key and the two tone blue and white which is part of that logo. We would like to know what you suggest. The site must be search friendly and fast loading. So feel free to give any suggestions.

Thanx! :D

Well, for starters.. You don't have to design the site for 640x480

You'll need to organise the content. Its pretty messy there and I have no idea where to get intro the main info cause the stuff there are all over.

Try to keep the site short. So the visitor don't have to scroll so far down to get the info. Start and archiving system.

Can't say much now.. I'm not one of the pros here.. Dek, Torn anyone wanna add?

You have to give your site some character, now it looks like one of those sites with only links on.

It seems to be all links to other pages. I like the suggestion about not making it for 640x480, since it would look less crowded that way.

I don't like the scanline bg (a bit too much contrast) and the text is a bit too blurry. The corners don't match, either. On the top right, they are rounded, but straight on the bottom and for titles...

Also, the woman is ugly ;) ...

There is absolutely nothing wrong with the site working in 640 x 480 resolution. The problem is that it just stays that size no matter what your resolution is. I think you are already planning on doing a fluid or liquid design, unless you are using that word in another way. Ideally it should squish down to that size, but also stretch to fit all other resolutions.

The main problem with the current site is that it is totally overwhelming. You are just trying to shove way too much stuff in people's face at once. This is a problem with just about any site that trys to be a 'portal' and do it all. A lot like yahoo. I can't stand yahoo anymore. All I want to do there is search the internet, but instead they have 50 billion other things they are trying to get you to do at the same time. Google is the perfect search engine. The first thing you see, is the search box. Yahoo now hides the search box with a million other links trying to get you to buy things or stuff other services down your throat.

The site needs some serious reorganization and minimizing. I would worry about fixing your Information Architecture before worrying about the next color you are going to use on the layout...

There is no consistent navigation bar anywhere on the site... It looks to me like the only way to actually navigate anywhere successfully is to return to the homepage and sort thru the hundreds of links everytime.

It looks like the boxes down the middle of the front page labeled "news" "sports" etc. are the only organizational elements used in the whole site. Even those are not labeled consistently though. Some have the title in the top left, others, like the school one, have it in an image in the lower right. It does not make it easy to glance at the page and understand how it is organized.

It is very difficult to tell which links are going to keep you in the site, and which links will take you to another site. It actually seems that after you click on a few links, they all go to different sites and there is very little if any original content on the site itself. This makes you question why you even have the site there, other than to generate advertising revenue and amazon.com commissions.

It is very difficult to come to the site with a specific question or interest in mind and successfully find it. Because of the lack of organization, you have to basically read every single link on the page before you can find what you are looking for.

For instance, on the front page, next to the graphic of the big headed people, there is a column of random links. Some of them are "places to go" "see a movie" "eat dinner out" "see an art exhibit" and others. These could all be grouped under a heading called "Entertainment", and it would be much easier to find them. Instead, they are grouped in with school closings, chillicothe history, church information, a birdwatcher camera, a chat room, etc.

There is also a lot of duplication and cross over throughout the page. For instance, if you are looking for sports news, you could click sports news on the left column and be taken to www.infospace.com. Or you could click further down the middle column for sports news, and go to www.the-sportspage.com.

There are countless other examples that I could point out, but you get the idea.

Overall I get the feeling that the last concern on the designer's mind was how to make the site easy to use and valuable to the user. Instead, it was how many ads can we jam into this site, and how many times can we give credit to our own design company for making the site, and how much information taken from other sites can we link to? Perhaps the intentions were good by providing a central resource for information for citizens of the community, but that is not how it turned out. Instead the site is confusing, difficult to understand and navigate, and not a very valuable tool to anyone.

I would suggest your next layout start with some reorganization and some rethinking of why you are even making the site, rather than where to put your logo.

so thats where dek's been for the last 3 days :D

thanx for the info, we've been planning on a new design for the site because we didn't care for that original design that a past designer done, we needed some suggestions before we start actually starting on the design. organization has been our concern from the beginning. again thanx for the suggestions!!