I just finished my new hosting design at http://www.empirehost.com. Could anyone please check it out and tell me what they think and if they have any suggestions.

Blah,I dont like it

You got to be kidding. Maybe this was a nice look for a website in.. 1985! Sorry for being mean. Maybe I need a shot or something, but it hurts just lookin at the site.

I was hoping to have few suggestions

You probably need some more lessions on using Photoshop or something. Or maybe you can pay someone to design the entire site for you. =)

Seriously... some people have a knack for design, some don't. I'm somewhere in the middle, but I finally decided it was time to have a pro work on the QWK.Net site. If you're really serious about what you're doing, I'd recommend doing the same.

At any rate, check out webpagesthatsuck.com

No, it's not an insult. It is a great website that teaches webdesign with bad examples.

It helped me A LOT in the initial stages of learning web design.

A couple of suggestions:

1. Too many colors. You should try to limit the colors of your text and background to one or two, I count 10 different text colors.

2. I can't tell for sure, because I am not a graphic designer, but it would appear that the font of the text underneath your banner is different from the font of the text in the rest of the page. This adds to the confusion.

3. You also might want to tighten up the wording opn the page. Some of the phrases are either incomplete sentences, or have poor capitalization. Some examples:

* No starting Setup fees for shared plans -- the only time you have setup fees is when you start the account, so the sentence is slightly redundant.

* Real E-commerce needs to use highly sophisticated programming languages on the best servers with large quantity of hard drive space and bandwidth. -- I would probably reword that to read something like: Today's E-commerce sites require sophisticated programming languages and powerful servers with great storage capacity. These servers must be part of a robust network with plenty of bandwidth.

* Artists are encouraged to start their music or image streaming site -- This sentence has two different size fonts, which can be annoying.

Hope this helps.

allan

Keep up the spirit!

Webdesigning isn't easy, but very IMPORTANT. It's like a job-interview: the first impressions is sooo important.

I'd get a designer to do it.

Good Luck.

c64 look? cool :)

Well the site could maybe use a little work. I paid a design company to do my design because I felt that the one I did was not good enough. You may want to try that. A freelancer would be better and much cheaper then a big design company in my opionion. Checkout Devstorm.com they did mine.

We did the same thing. We contacted a freelance designer to have her do our last site update. It just made more sense, I would rather shell out $500-$1000 to have someone do the work, so we can concentrate on hosting :).

Plug:
heather@astrogeek.net did our site, and she was great to work with.

Don't like it. Too ugly, and noone will join a company that has a site design like that.

Found some spelling errors, the colors clash a bit (sorry, just dont care for red n blue together...gives a 3dish look to me)

top grfx while having potential, ended up leaving me un-wowed.

also got a ton of script errors when I entered the site.

got som egood ideas there, just needs some tightening up :)

webpagesthatsuck..... very good read. another good book IMHO is "dont make me think" more on the usability side of site design.

Good luck!