And ideas to spice up my bland site?

[roosterXIII]

Hey everyone.
I need help spicing up a website. It's www.vccattlemen.com
The colors are bland, but that's the colors the person wanted.
I am going to add a slideshow between the links, and main body text. I had one, but i broke it trying to improve it, but just imaging a slide show is there. The main content is also just a placeholder until they give me content. A few blank pages, but like I said, I'm waiting for content. Should I add a module or something maybe to the right of the main text? Not sure what yet, but if you all think something should be there, ill fine something.
The board of directors page is ugly. I'm going to add an image for the heading of both lists. I'm going to make a nice one in photoshop. And yes, the board of directors page is a table, but I will make it CSS soon.
Should I spice up the contact page and make it more colorful?
Also, on the top left, I have a custom HTML module, with a contact link. In my template.css file, I did set it to no text decoration, so I not sure why it is still underlined. I even tried the inline code, but its still underlined.

Basically,what do you all think I should do to bring the website to life? I still have a few weeks to finish the website before my deadline, but I just couldn't think of much to make it stand out.
Any suggestions?

Thanks all,
Rooster

[inSquare]

Layout and colour are a very subjective thing, so there's no right and wrong - it's hard to make a site look visually interesting if there's not much on there, it's normally images and text layout that make things look good. On that front, the content/colour scheme are going to make things difficult.

From a technical point of view, I think you need to have a read up on CSS3; the way the rounded corners are done is very complicated and is a simple bit of code in CSS3, rather than a confusing mix of divs and background images. You could also use box shadows from CSS3 (in moderation) to highlight certain things.

Also, why the tables in the footer holding the images - again, like the rounded corners, not a huge problem, there are just easier ways of doing things.

One big problem is with the background leather image - it's 1.4Mb, which is huge!! Look at whether you could tile an image to get the same effect.

There's nothing wrong with the site overall, but the way it's coded looks to be a few years out of date - and because of this, there's a huge amount of code to display a very small page!!

Hope this helps a bit,

Mick.

[roosterXIII]

I made the template with artisteer, so it automatically generated the round corners.

The images on top of the footer are in a table for no real reason. I haven't perfected the css float yet lol. I am a little old school still (as you can tell from my coding lol) and I'm just getting back into it. But I will change them to float. Having them in a table does mess it up on the ipad for some reason.

I didn't even think about the bg image. I will edit it and make it tile I think. That is pretty big, and that would be a good reason why the page takes a few minutes to load.

I will fix everything you pointed out tomorrow. Thanks!
Should I do something with the navigation? Or just leave it as is?

[inSquare]

Ahh, Artisteer - making the simple, very complicated!!

If you've got the time/inclination I'd just code it from scratch - there's nothing there that can't be done with a bit of CSS and it would half the amount code on the template.

For design ideas, you could maybe try making the background for the footer images a lighter colour, or putting each one in a lighter colour box, maybe with a very thin border - just something to break up the site into sections a bit more. Also, take a look at Google fonts to see if a different typeface makes things look nicer.

Best of luck,

Mick.

[linda_neale]

You could also get some ideas from some of the commercial template providers like joomlart, rockettheme, themeforest, yootheme etc. Good places for inspiration or even to buy and customize a template.