A Review of Veggie Advisor by Michael Gunner

Hi Ben

I noted with interest the rather large Brighton tag, as that's where I live!

Anyway, onto the design.

First of all, the first review suggests a gradient. The only gradients that ever really work for web design are very soft, very gradual gradients, the type where you have to look quite hard to see the change in colour. It is also best they are not a vivid bright or dark colour. So if I was you, I'd strongly suggest not taking that advice.

However, the background is an issue, and to be honest the design as a whole is not really that great. The biggest problem here is colour and texture. I imagine you are more a developer than a designer and this just goes to show the profession behind being a designer, colour and texture is hard to get right and this is very, very wrong.

There is no discernible colour scheme going on. Ideally, aside from pictures, your site should use no more than 4/5 colours. You should have a background colour, a highlight colour, body text colour, headline colour and maybe 1/2 variations, i.e. a slight change in tone. At the moment I can count about 10 different colours on your site, and the colours that are there don't work well together - i.e. you have a lurid green logo on a brown wood texture background. You need to think about whether such a shade of green really works for this application. Generally speaking, I would use textures that are much more subtle.

My other problem, besides colour, is the layout, which is generally poor I'm afraid to say. The main problem is that you've got this wood theme going on, but then suddenly there's just a big white square in the middle. You really need to soften this up, I'd suggest doing this by adding rounded corners, and making the colour more of an off-white. The rounded corners would also then fit in better with the tabs which are already round (n.b. the colour of the tabs...ergh!). You should be able to do this in a way that doesn't use images and works on all browsers.

" -moz-border-radius:12px; -khtml-border-radius: 12px; -webkit-border-radius: 12px; border-radius:12px;"

That's how I do it. You'll need to use some javascript to get it to work in ie.

I'd also suggest having 6 frontpage content boxes instead of 3. I think that way, you'll have a bit more info on the page to catch peoples interest.

The footer is also a problem, it just seems to be floating around aimlessly with no real connection to the rest of the site. The text colour is wrong too....remember the golden rule, when you have a coloured/textured background the text colour must be a contrasting colour.

Personally if I was you I'd ditch the footer you've got and just have a very simple footer with links to your pages and content. The tag cloud is just..hideous!

You also need to find a better way to integrate social media. Your twitter icon is also just floating about, make it fit in with the design! How about using Facebook connect? By using Facebook connect you can have your site so that anyone already logged into facebook can interact with your wordpress, make comments, use a forum etc.

My reviews tend to just be a jumble of my thoughts so to summarise...

1. Develop a good colour scheme containing no more than 5/6 colours. Apply appropriately.
2. Re-work footer and layout to produce a more cohesive, fluid design. Ditch the tag cloud, it's pointless.
3. Find a way to integrate social media more effectively. Develop your site to encourage user interaction using Facebook connect.
4. Add rounded corners to the main content area, to fit in better with the rounded tabs and to produce a more natural, softer design.

Good luck! I note you're using wordpress, if you don't know how to setup Facebook connect drop me a line and I'll show you how....it might be a good idea to anyway as you really don't want to faff around with the plugins that don't work - only one works properly.