Launch of MyNeighborhoodTrends.com

First... you say that the sign up/membership is the main goal of the site ("getting members") but taking a quick 30 second glance at the site I didn't really see anything about signing up on the home page. Having some call to action is a big deal when you are looking for members. (navigation doesn't count)

You have a navigation menu with the four squares from the home page that appear after you navigate away, but they appear to be global so they should appear globally. Should also be some indication that the user is on a current page.

Next, if your goal is membership, don't put Free Trial and Order Now. I don't see any reason really that someone would order now if they can get a free trial. Make the free trial upgrade after or offer to upgrade instead. Or simply put the free trial on the membership/order page and don't make it too obvious in the first place. Demo and Free trial could be combined as well.

There should be a home link on your navigation menu as well, just the logo isn't really good enough, unless it at least is in line with the menu to look like an extra option.

The site has a bit of a cheap look to it, so I think giving it a little sophistication to it will go a long way into making it look as good as it can. It also is very distracting and hard to figure out really where to look because of it's brightness and multitude of color.

1) The background is a little too bright and flashy. A slight gradient would probably be good enough to solve this problem, and I might try a little bit darker color here too.

2) Gradients on your nav are too strong. Make those a bit more subtle and they will look better. I'd probably decrease the curvature a little bit too.

3) The header looks like an afterthought or something. Maybe adding some imagery or spreading out the info on the right out a little bit.

4) If you are going to have some padding on the bottom of the screen have some at the top. I'd maybe add a thin border around the white body as well.

5) The color is too vibrant and varying. You have reds and greens and blues and yellows and more on the site and it is all quite distracting. There's not really any reason to make every box a different color on that home page.

6) Typography/spacing. In the body text, the words don't seem to have much reason behind the spacing. Everything is probably a little too far away from itself. In the boxes on the right some things are aligned center, some right, some left, some are just kind of random. Should make that a bit more consistent.

7) The map search box is very crowded for no reason. You have a lot of padding inside the box but it runs up right against the other information.

I'm going to split my review into segments to help you.

1. Colours. Wow, that is a strong, dominating blue you've got going on there. What's interesting is how there appears to be no colour scheme whatsoever. Your site should stick to using the same basic colours, and no more than 3/4, and generally it's best to use contrasting colours. For instance, having two different blues, one for your background, and one for the navbar, is just plain odd. It's also unattractive. You have black, white and (another shade of) blue text, red buttons and also a dash of unsightly green. I would re-consider your colour scheme and colour your site appropriately.
2. Logo. Not a great logo. I can barely read it, Grandma probably won't even see it. This must be fixed, it needs to be bolder, bigger, and ideally use less colours.
3. Layout. I'm not digging the two columns. There isn't enough padding, and the text occupies too much of the page. One column is also higher than the other.
4. Where have I seen those Web 2.0 buttons before? Ah - Google. Not good - ditch any pre-made graphics and put in the time and effort to making your own. There are plenty of online tutorials that will help you with this.
5. The video. I know this is separate, really, but I felt compelled the comment. You really need to ditch this. The reason for having a video is that you present to the person visiting the website, a graphic talkthrough of the purpose of the site. The video needs to sell the site to the viewer. Your video achieves none of this. It presents the information as text - so what's the point? Anyone can read the text on the page. The voice is also annoying, and the recording of it has made it fuzzy.
6. Visual communication. Where do I sign up? How do I use this thing? Your website communicates its purpose very poorly. Even after writing all this, I still don't know what the point of it is.

I would personally start afresh. Your design needs to communicate it's purpose perfectly, get straight to the point, and present itself in a visually appealing manner. Currently, your existing design does not achieve this.

Good luck!

Hi Eddie,

You seem to know your business very well, you target a very narrow niche with your service and you have a business model which is very refreshing taking into considerations so many clones of 'social' sites nowadays. These three elements are giving your future business good foundations but you will have to change the way you are selling it or 'it will never fly'.

1. Overall design is very poor and it will affect your credibility big time. People tend to trust much less sites which do not look professionally. In your case credibility is 'to be or not to be'

2. Too much text is a conversion killer. If you cant explain the concept in so called one-liner there is huge chance it will fail. People need to grasp the idea in seconds or they will click the back button.

3. Look is very complicated and I have a hard time trying to understand how it works and what is what after putting a test Zip Code. First user experience is crucial - if they find it too difficult they will not use it. It's even more important if you would like to target general public (small private investors) and not only real-estate specialist.

4. Homepage usability suffers - in a nutshell all elements are wrong, or in a wrong place, or wrongly designed. And I mean all from logo & name, login, social icons, menu, to intro text, call to action, feature listings, links & buttons. And this is only homepage I'm talking about.

5. Earning 50.000$-100.000$ (from 1000 users) to cover the cost of data is a tall order and frankly I can't imagine it with the site looking like this.

I tool the liberty of drawing a quick wireframe of a simpler and more user friendly home page. This is the way the whole site should be redesigned with a new users experience in mind. Your system can be only complicated from the backend but never from the frontend.

Hope it helps.

Keep up the good work.

Cheers!

Michael (user experience designer & strategist)

Eddie

I am going to assume you launched it as alpha, so that it was better than beta?

No seriously, this site has a few issues, predominantly User Experience issues, the design seems very flt and uninteresting, if it wasn't for the fact that I was reviewing the site, I wouldn't of looked at it.

The logo, is uninspiring please note if this offends, these are just my opinions, as a designer and UI developer...

Colors and Icons, are very brash and in your face, I would suggest looking at making this have a more urban design feel theme, that way you could get a lot more foot traffic.

The main nav, seems to be very static it really doesn't make me feel like exploring it.

I would make the search bar the main focus as that is what you want people to do, I also think when you place the review you let us know what the site is for, because the logo, doesn't tell me anything.

My Neighbourhood Trends - Trends in what, by the look of the logo I would of first thought stocks...

IMHO, you need to rethink the design, once the design is nutted out you need to get it tested by a person, not a designer or developer, try a sales person, they usually give decent helpful feedback.

From there you tweak your initial design based on the feedback and then look at the development side of things.

This will also increase SEO, as you will be designing / developing upon User Interaction and Experience.

Good Luck!

OK, I'm going to give the benefit of the doubt and assume you are posting this BEFORE your redesign, and not that it IS the redesign. That would certainly be a great place to get your input for the work ahead. :)

OK, so you can see my notes for the thoughts...

overall layout seems to be fine. i would work on the text because it looks too scattered and i don't know where to look first. should condense and simplify to help readers focus. we have short attention spans and memory.

Hello,

Your tab navigation does not fit well into the header and perhaps the colors too strong. From navigation items(pdt info, demo, faq, free trial, order now, ...reports, abt us), you can improve more on the site information architecture. I will revisit contents and structure links or menu items as intuitive as possible and do categorization if necessary.

I will probably go with a simple horizontal menu with a subtle blue color.

Background color could be done away with and instead drop shadow around the main page container.

The call to actions seem cluttered on the homepage and main content on the left seems empty and probably not enough style was done.

I will redo most of design and all the best.

Well, a lot of people have already said it above and I won't go through the list of things that are not right because simply put they well conclude in just one answer- "Redesign the whole site".

This is not to discourage you in any way, even we design many useless designs and have to work from scratch all over again. But it all adds up to the learning phase.

Would suggest start with jotting down the purpose of the site, your objectives and then logically reasoning with oneself how you can drive the users to the same.

On the design front I think you should first and foremost design the logo. This one is too kiddish and seems like a joke. It may take time but the end results will be worth is, Best of Luck!

Piyush