Need some constructive feedback

Hey everyone,

check out http://colui.co.uk/sites/castiel/

Could you please give me some constructive feedback on how to improve the visual hierarchy, typography and overall design.

Unfortunately it got rejected with the following reason:

1) Good idea to have such different theme option page.

2) The typography, visual hierarchy and overall design need improvements.

Many thanks in advance

Ok I have fixed many spacing issues and typography issues.

Any comments from the community would be very much appreciated.

As there are no replies I’m guessing it’s all OK or super bad!

I’ll say it’s OK but links color seems to bright for me.

Thank you denoizzed,

I agree with you, I have made it a bit darker.

I find widget titles a bit misguiding ( Celebrities, Advertisement, Recent Comments…): you use green colour which is also used for links in the body copy. Also I think it’s unreadable on the black backgrounds.

Top horizontal block with only date inside is a bit of wasted space, IMHO . Search/social icons maybe?

Footer looks a bit empty.

Thanks fulltank,

I have changed the headers to white – and I’ll add some social icons to the topbar. I don’t really want to change the footer.

Many thanks.

stevebluck,

I would have to say that if you were to take away all the ads (Envato banners, etc..), the website would be extremely and way too plain. In other words, you have relied heavily on the Envato marketplace ads to design/style your website. I was immediately distracted by the ads and was not caught reading one word on the site.

This is highly non-userfriendly and needs extra special attention and has to do alot with “visual higherarchy”. Read this helpful article on the Themeforest blog:

http://blog.themeforest.net/tutorials/visual-hierarchy-in-web-design/

I hope this is helpful, Luke at His Handiwork

Thanks HisHandWork,

The ads are just widgets, I have just put an ad in every spot available, the user can switch each section on or off. So this site could have 0 ads.

You can replace each ad with a different widget, so I can’t see it being too plain. But perhaps you’re right.

I have placed the ads on the demo to show the user where they can place them.

I made a screencast about how things are added and removed to the theme itself, take a look:

http://screenr.com/YWD

I guess the visual hierarchy is off. I’ll see what I can do to it.