need some feedback :/

Im thinking of redesigning my site, as i hate it!

I seem to be able to work on great looking sites for everyone but myself :(
(like a pc engineer who builds pcs by the book with all the screws and pretty microsoft stickers, but uses sellotape to hold harddrives in their own!)

Any kind/hard/honest feedback welcome
www.d-grafix.com <---this one (news) is the worst of all

Kind/Hard/Honest? Let's see if I can do all three combined.

The vast majority of the design is good. I don't see much wrong with the fundamentals of the design.

Brown is a bad color, if the entire thing was changed to a nice ( not too dark or primary ) shade of blue or green, the entire site would look ten times better.

Your logo at the top is not pretty, appears a bit stretched and generally detracts from the site. One of your main products is a terrain editor and your logo shows the ugliest terrain on your entire site. Every single T.Ed screenshot looks much, much prettier than the terrain in that logo. You want to convey a good image, so use a nice bright sunny picturesque landscape like this one :

h**p://www.d-grafix.com/images/fs/vista2.jpg

EDIT: didn't want to post the image, so I've changed t's to *'s in the URL.

Have a different page as your homepage. The news page should stay, of course, but not as the homepage. Yout homepage should be ordered by importance, not by date. Have your best selling products at the top, not the one you released most recently. T.Ed is third on the list, but ( I assume ) your commercial focus. Unless you desperately want it that way. Commercially I think it makes more sense to have the moneyspinner on top so people don't miss it.

Hope that helps.

Looked okay to me. I like different designs with quirky personal styles...but from a business point of view I wouldn't really know what to do. I can't ever say a pretty website design has ever made me buy something - info, facts, details, examples are way more important than colour schemes and tidyness to me...and then if it's what I'm after I'll buy it.

Honest impressions as follows:

Black to brown to white is too extreme.

The logo concept is nice apart from it gets too bright for it's surroundings.

The text on the buttons suffers the same problem. A big shift from dark to bright is over the top.

The textures on the buttons looks like something you'd find in a freeware website button builder.

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The good news.
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The layout of the site is pretty good, nice and easy to navigate and quick to load.

I don't think you should mess too much with the layout apart from emphasizing what you are offering as the main homepage and make it obvious what to click for downloads.

Make the thumbnail shots clickable to show larger screen shots. Potential customers like to see in glorious colour what they're getting.

Overall though your site is pretty good but with a few teaks and a better blending of colours it would be a lot better :)

I think it needs to be more interactive like others said, should be able to click on the pictures to get to the product and should be able to get to big screenshots. I don't mind the brown theme but combined with lots of black and not much other color it's a little dull and bland.

I agree about the buttons looking a bit stereotypical photoshop gradient filled.

Well they do say a picture speaks louder than words. And nobody seems to pay any attention to the later anyway.

Running 1900x1080 or something there Flame. o.O

I got 1280x1024 here and about 40% of the page width is taken by the black bars.

I can see why he chose the fixed width, but daaaaamn.

Regarding a redesign, well, not much I can really help out with there, since I ain't exactly a pro with them, still currently in the web-design stages of experimentation, basically, playing around with different layout setups (using good ol' CSS) and see what I can come up with that's appealing.

Fine print at the bottom: Gross

Banner:
Too much information... Try simplifying it a bit with a more abstract image. Perhaps one that allows you to use a 100% width design to appease FlameDuck?
Tiny links at the bottom look like sub-links of the current section, but they are not.
Page titles do not well match banner link titles, leading to confusion; there is no way to tell what section is being viewed.

Where does the brown come from?
I think the banner with that extra brown around it looks odd, but I can't quite put my finger on why.

The text on your news page looks inconsistent. I guess it isn't really, but the indentation bounces around a lot!
The T.ED page is smothered in text and images, and I can't make sense of it. Multiple columns and if I scroll down too far I get to this scary changelog thing... Looks like everything about it has been crammed into the same place.

"LATEST NEWS: About D-Grafix Design" (?!)

Oh, and:
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.d-grafix.com%2F

I think one problem here is that your pages are trying to say too much at once. Subsections help, in my opinion, but of course they need a sensible presentation. Play with it a bit and see how other web sites (like this one) achieve it.
I can't help much, but good luck!

Thanks guys, I think my first stop is definitely the logo & menu. Not sure where the brown came from i guess i just 'followed through :D' from the image itself.
Strangely enough, before i shrank and changed reduced its colors it looked good, now it looks shyte :/

@gabriel: LOL whew! thanks for that(removin the link), i did kind of wince when i thought of the bandwidth :D . Good comments though, thanks 4 the input.

Ill look into how to get a good dynamic size system on the go, but the problem is its hard to predict how it will look on all systems ie. i dont want entire paragraphs stretched into one line.
Has the oldskool idea of designing to an 780 width been overtaken by 1004 these days?

I would have hoped it had evolved into the idea of designing for whatever display size the user has. Although I realise this means designers will need to spend more than 20 minutes on their CSS.

That's just incredible! Flameduck using Windows XP.

Why is that incredible? I've been using XP the last 3.5 years.

The clincher isn't the CSS flame. It is the graphics.

Mainly. It is customers expecting flashy awesome graphics that look great, but not caring or knowing about other display sizes... So they want it to look perfect on their own display. And they have the money. So that is what they get.

I think ive found a flavor i favor :)

I will when i get time (thatll be the day!)im going to start thinking about a more dynamic css and will design the individual pages to allow them to use whatever space theyre given without flatening.

At the moment ive just added some faded eyecandy on left which folds under the central page to make it a bit less boring on large displays.

Whatcha think? This is @1200x1024 (img scaled to 1024) which is as big as my display can go :(

It looks nice. Maybe use slightly larger margins to the left and right of the text?

i will be redesigning all the pages themselves, at the moment nothing has changed on the content. Its just the logo, menu and feel that im working on at the mo.