

Ask HN: Would love your advice, critique and ideas - marketconsensus

Hi everyone,<p>I would like to seek your advice and feedback on a social media platform that we launched a week ago. We are in the process of courting the media (press releases, connecting with reporters, etc). Before going too far into the process, I wanted to reach out to you to see if we could get your collective suggestions, critiques or ideas on the site (UI, navigation, message, etc).<p>Although the site is designed for stock investors, we felt it would be great to get feedback from this group based on your collective technical and development experience.<p>Any feedback is highly appreciated. Here is the link: http://www.marketconsensus.com/<p>Thanks and looking forward to your thoughts.<p>Ogbe Airiodion
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duiker101
I kind of like the idea, but I think your are really out of the way with the
design, there is still a LOT of work to do. Everything feels like a website
from some years ago, it looks really...flat it's say. There are too many
shades of blue and they are used without an apparent reason. The gradients are
wrongly used, a light blue fading to white under a white text is not a good
idea. A lot of elements have unreasonable inconsistent size, like the search
box, is too small.

After this quite harsh review, I suppose you are not having access to a
designer. That's fine but I strongly suggest to at least have a look to the
designs you can find on themeforest.net, most are quite cheap(20$) and will
give a whole new feeling to the website.

I know the design might sound as a secondary thing to a developer but I'm
afraid that without a decent one the media will not even take you in account,
which is a real shame because the idea is really nice.

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codegeek
I second this comment about design. Looks very outdated. Why don't you use
bootstrap or zurb foundation to get it giong ?

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duiker101
I agree that Zurb might be an idea, but I would not use Bootstrap, while it's
a great product it is not to create ultimated websites but, as the name
suggest, jsut to hack something together quickly, it should be avoided for
final products.

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tangue
\- What's good

While I don't know much about what you're talking about, I quickly understood
what's the purpose of this website

\- What should be your first priority

Your goal is to have the highest number of people signing-up. Focus on that.
Reduce the clutter. Improve your signal to noise ratio. Have a look at some of
Edward Tufte principles (in his own words _"Make all visual distinctions as
subtle as possible, but still clear and effective."_ )

\- What's wrong but can be fixed

Well as almost everyone said, it's not a design up to our standards in 2012.
But this should not be a problem. It seems that you're usign Drupal. I'm quite
sure there's a Drupal Bootstrap module. Just moving your design to Bootstrap
will be a huge improvement. You'll be free to fine-tune the design later.

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marketconsensus
Wow! A big thank you to everyone for all the provided feedback. Taking the
various reviews into consideration, I see that the design most definitely
needs to be enhanced. Will be looking at revamping the site design to best
gain a more professional look. Our goal is definitely to have the highest
number of people signing-up, as such we'll also be focusing on reducing the
clutter.

Thanks duiker101, Tangue, codegeek and Y234.

Looking forward to receiving more feedback and critique from the HN community.
Please keep it coming.

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Y234
I also agree with the above comments that more could be done regarding the
design. The navigation is great and I kind of understood the message, but the
overall design is ....an eye sore to say the least

