Topic: Opinions Please

It's been a while since I've posted here but, of course, I have been in lurk mode for quite a while. I thought I'd post a little something I've been working on for a friend's dance studio. Any constructive criticism would be greatly appreciated.

http://www.phoenixdancestudio.com/test/

Oh... forgot to mention that the dancing people below the logo is just a placeholder for another Flash gizmo I'm working on. You can disregard the placeholder... I already know it's ugly and obnoxious.

Don't need the tables for the layout.

I normally think a body background image that's somehow "themed" with the site's content is rather lame but the dance floor could actually be nice if it were used a little more subtley.

I think a key to the subtlety mentioned above would be blending things in a bit, the blue boxes hovering over the wood floor is 2 seperate elements that don't belong together. The main content box also needs to be aligned to the top of it's cell (in table-talk) as a matter of cleanup.

This is very fragmented stuff, nothing's tying it together as a site, if this dance studio has a personality, and the personality is conveyed through the site, it is schizophrenic (wood bg, blue boxes, crazy tribal tattoo smoke pentacostal logo thingy, big crazy showcard gothicy looking header font). On top of that the content readability is a problem, I have real trouble with white on blue, not to mention the other color choices in the text and nav links.

welcome back, thought I recognized the nick when I saw the thread starter!

Thanks for the ideas, Jason.

The unfortunate part is there are a few things that are mostly out of my control due to requests by the studio. I guess that would have been helpful information to have at the offset. The title logo font, "tribal tattoo" logo, and the blue/white color scheme were all choices made by the studio. I tried to give my opinion that the "tribal tattoo" logo did not fit well with the title logo and neither of them really suited the site but they were dead set on keeping them in some fashion.

I will do some playing around with the color scheme some more (variations of other blue tones and maybe some off-whites) to see if there may be something that "clicks" better.

Again, thanks for the ideas. And thanks for the welcome too. I'm gonna try posting more often in hopes to soak up some of the overflowing knowledge around here.

The 'black' font on the menu is unreadable. and the only reason I can read 'welcome' and 'upcoming events' is because of the size of the font and spacing (white space) around each. but still not acceptable imo.

said nicely... he said. =)