Website for Fire Department

Unfortunately, this looks quite amateur. I'm unsure of your experience in design and with Photoshop due to your lack of a profile on CF but this looks like it violates some of the most basic rules in contemporary design. Less is more is the key here.. this may look simple due to the lack of information but it's really overwhelming.

A few key notes: The size of the logo is far too large. There is an enormous overuse of red. The gradient on the nav is a bit old-school looking (has a bit of a 1990's feel). There is no footer.

Not trying to break your spirit man.. just trying to help. It's easy to throw together a site design in Photoshop using some tricks you may already know.. a tip I'd give you is find browse through some amazing site designs you find on the web and learn how to mimic them and their Photoshop techniques.

As others pointed out it requires major changes.. It looks like one block of the website than a real website itself.

Header has imprved but lots of scope of improvement in there. You can use illustrations to spice up.

But before working any further I would want you to draw the basic layout. Identify the basic elements of your webpage. and then play with colors and typography.

Take a paper pencil, draw up your layout. Check out other similiar sites for inspiration. :)

all the best..

Its too red. Too easy. Too hard. I became tired wile i see this concept and bright vivid red color keeps me nervous. also its not according with logo. i think you should try grungy or retro style with pastel tones with red elements only.

Hi Joseph,

Like a lot of your previous feedback, this design is going to need a lot of work; it still looks a lot like a work-in-progress. Currently, I can't say whether or not the header is the right direction since the rest of the layout looks very dated and unfinished.

Here's a number of things that might help spice up the design:

1) Colour: the red is overpowering, which makes it difficult to read the text. Consider placing the text on a white background (or equivalent). The red could also be used more subtly, such as in a navigation bar or text header colours. Play around with colour a bit; colourlovers.com and kuler are both excellent sites to create palettes.

2) Frontpage: what exactly is the block of text going to be on the frontpage? Most sites have at most two seconds to attract a visitor, and most won't stick around to read big chunks of text. Who is going to visit this site? What will they be looking for? If people are interested in, say, "recent incidents", putting a news updater on the frontpage may be a good idea. Alternatively, if the visitor is looking for history, maybe break up the block into different pieces to make it more easily digestbile.

3) footer: the design would look more complete with a footer. People looking for contact information could find it right away.

4) Break up the header and content: Miro had a great suggestion about including a large image between navigation and the content. The image of the fire truck, or perhaps another image, might work well.

5) mood and message: what mood are you trying to convey? Answering this question might actually help a lot in terms of aesthetics and direction.

Here's a couple of firefighting sites that convey some of the suggestions listed above: http://hpff.ca/content/home

http://www.firedepartment.org/ (this one is really out of the box, but uses some great imagery and interactivity to promote its services)

http://www.kerncountyfire.org/

Unfortunately, good fire department websites are hard to come by, so checking out css gallery sites for some inspiration might help as well.

Overall, I think you have a really good starting base; now you just need to build up from there! :)

Cheers, Serina

home page has not much content so it doesn't look good....

The header does look quite a bit better. Keep working on the rest of the page though. I think you need to reduce the amount of red in the design.