Rare Disease Charity (Draft)

You're off to a good start. I know how difficult it can be working with a client that doesn't allow you creative freedom. Def. a pain in the hiney.

But sometimes, with constraints, it can help focus our creativity better. One such thing is playing with typography. With CSS3, it's awesome that we have the opportunity to play with as many fonts as possible.

First off, I abhor the sponsors section, drives me nuts when someone thinks it matters but I'm sure the client wants it there. (take it out when it's launched ;d)

I notice you don't really have a call to action like donate now (Yes, I see the button at the top, but have more and make it the first element of the navigation.)

So, I came up with a slight alternative for ya. The heading is Aller from FontSquirrel.

Psst. I know there's a lot of padding in between columns but maybe make it 3 columns.

Another idea is having a really big background image and have the containers with text be white with rounded corners to give a more emotional connection to the user. The featured images to actually be news items so people know when something's new.

Hope this helps!

Noel,

Dramatic improvement over the current design.

What's Strongest:

• Emotional photo on the banner - is extremely persuasive and frames the type of site at a glance. It satisfies superficial interests from a psychological standpoint versus someone interested in elaborate details.
• Fat Footer area - creates a great area for placing ancillary information.
• Level 2 page is very strong...

What Needs Additional Work:

• The two columns could benefit from more rigorous design. Try a list module approach (see mock-up)
• Rework Light Blue Sub-titles
• Rework the Sponsorship logos in that section

Looks like you have been hard at work? This is nicely done however there are a few tweaks that need to be addressed, I'll use notes.

So overall, as always a very nicely designed site, I would just make a few tweaks and Voila!

Good Luck!

Hello!

I have mix feelings about this design. My head is spinning and my mind doesn't settle: one side say nice draft... the other side say NOT SO FAST, MISTER!

One think that bothers me is the color combo. I love white. I love gray. I love the light blue. But they make the site looks too sad! At least give the site some RAY OF LIGHT!

May I suggest using a darker gray or black for header, slideshow/big image, footer. Get rid of gradient on footer. Then use blue to highlight some features... and add another color (maybe a dark red) to headers, etc.

Or just go fully dark. I think message will stand out more.

I like the menu except the DONATE button. Looks out of place. Why don't you do this: let us see the whole girl's face... position her to the left. Then instead of a horizontal block, make the block vertical on the right. Put your main message and below the message (same block) put your DONATE button. Make it BIGGER!!! After all, that's the purpose of the site... to get donations.

Separate the panels/blocks a little bit.

Overview is ok... but that header looks bad. Use another font. Consider using another color when background is white. That blue looks good on black but on white it looks weak.

News are ok... but header looks bad. View all is a link... so make it look like a link. Images can go, in my opinion. If you still need images there, consider making them smaller. Another suggestion is to change the lighter background, maybe to a light blue.

You should move sponsors from that column and display a full block. So Overview and News will be columns, and under these cols you'll have the Sponsors.

Footer is ok... but Important Links look out of palce with the other two cols. Oh, and get rid of gradient.

As for the subpage, if you want to keep the image then you can make it smaller... maybe full width but just 80px high. Or make it a square and float it to the right inside the Page or Post.

I honestly don't like the Navigation there. In fact, I don't like the navigation at all. If you just want to have a sidebar, then keep it to the right. After all that's where you have the NEWS on the Homepage. Be consistent! Oh and if it is a sidebar, then use it more wisely. Don't just put navigation links. And the blue bar... yikes! Doesn't match with rest of design.

But not bad for a draft. Keep up the good work.

Overall I like it; the blue and black colour scheme gives a powerful presentation with a medical overtone.

I have no problem with Wordpress. Many professional designers malign it but it can do more than blogging and gives an easy to use CMS interface.

See my comments on the annotations.

I like the clean intent of the design and encourage you to stay with that. You need to keep it very very simple. Here is how I see the problem. This is a site that will be turned over to non-designers to maintain using a fairly permissive CMS with very little or no checks on picture sizes, fonts and a million other things that can make the site look like a disaster in a hurry. So your design needs to take this into account.

1. don't rely on the big emotive picture. The design needs to work no matter what they put in there.
2. do not do images in every heading. Same problem as #1 only that it starts out difficult. What is a good picture for forums? You could introduce a layout for secondary pages where a picture at the text level is optional
   1. Use more blue
   2. DO NOT TAKE OUT THE SPONSORS!!!!! the sponsors are important to...themselves. They pay the bills. instead solve the problem, make them all gray with a color hover lined up into neat boxes at the bottom. in fact you could go in the other direction and feature on the top one sponsor a month explaining why they support this cause. it will make the home page more dynamic and give sponsors more notoriety.
   3. if this is going to be a blog format "news" needs to be more important that the static text of "overview"
   4. If I may say so again. Keep it clean and uncluttered as you have it now

A little off topic:

Address the confusing name OrphanBiotech

My first impression when I saw this was that is was about orphans! and the girl picture only reinforced that. Somehow you need to convey "underfunded" or "non-funded" biotech research. A pic of an actual beneficiary with a caption: Hi I am Johnny I have a disease that only 30 other people in the world have. I am counting on one person (you) to find a cure.

Hi Noel, nice design, I liked the layout in general.

My opinion is that the educational part is good, maybe you could improve the donation.

Here are some ideas for you:

The donate button stands out, but I would like to see some more reasons to donate.

Maybe adding a section like "How many people already donated" or something like that.

Show people how easy is to donate, tell them what payment options they have.

You could use the top left blank space to show how much the institution already have in donations.

I am ok with this design from the header upto the girl image and the caption but the design failed to capture attention from there itself. The overview and News section appear to be heavy and burdenful for user.

News section is very boring and not appealing. All news with a photograph, one heading and some content upto the bottom same design... looks very clumsy. Instead you can follow this format with image for just two news items in the top, and displaying the other news items as text links as show in www.ndtv.com Top stories section. One video news among this list would be interesting for current user population. Avoid "View all news" link since users are never interested to see the unknown news for which they dont have an idea.

Overview section also is very pathetic with more text. Align the logos properly under sponsors.

Otherwise I liked the girl image which is setting the emotional theme for users and the header part is just fine.

Meet the Team can be brought up as part of overview by reducing some text from the current overview. I liked the Joel's placement of sponsors' logos and Donate button.

Hi, Noel

I think it’s a good start. What bothers me in your design so far is the very tragic appeal. What they do is very serious matter, but they are actually working on hope and solution rather than mourning. I looked at the existing website, and aside being a mess, it has that pink flower image, that does just that: a feeling of hope. I am not suggesting using that image of course, but bringing some aliveness into design with imaging, some color, round corners and font, as was mentioned above. All your other websites are very much alive, and it seems to me that you having an issue with doing it in a magazine style and no texture. I personally always freeze, when someone says: I need it to be sleek and simple:))) But you can do it!

Best of luck!

Hi there!

I really like idea of black and blue. But this blue is too bright for me, especially on the white background.

"Sponsors" takes too much space, and logos are too big.

Columns "Overview" and "News"are too close to each other.

Picture of girl is awesome! I like it, it works very well for this kind of website.

Good luck! :)

That girl in the photo looks hypnotic rather than sick if thats what you going for. I like the colors. The footer needs some work and the sponsors I would position them in the footer. The mail icon is too bright and drags too much attention. I would get rid of the border in the photos of the right column.

I can assume this is in WordPress. The homepage is just what it needs to be; clean and to the point. The picture of the girl almost reminds me of that famous National Geographic picture of the woman with the piercing eyes.

Having a site like this in WordPress is great because you'll constantly be wanting to update readers on the latest in research in development.