Getting a new design for the site, and need some opinions.

[HaLo2FrEeEk]

Hey guys.  Just wanted to get a few opinions here.  Now, I'll be the first to say, my original (Ver. 1) design was horrible.  When I upgraded to Ver. 2, I was amazed, it looked SO much better, but, now I'm bored with it.  Here is my CURRENT design:

 

http://infectionist.com/

 

I held a contest on the site to design a new frontpage and the result was amazing.  I love this new design.  It changes the color scheme and just...flows, in my opinion.  Here is the image submitted for the new design:

 

http://infectionist.com/images/misc/Infection_Finalized_H2F.png

 

And here is a screenshot of the page in HTML, almost ready to go:

 

http://claninfectionist.com/images/misc/newCI_preview.png

 

What do you guys think of this new design?

[HaLo2FrEeEk]

Anyone?  Please?

[jcombs_31]

Your last link does not work.  As far as the design in the "submitted" link, I'm not a big fan.  It looks pretty amateur and thrown together by someone with limited photoshop skills. The attempt at a glossy/metallic looks just falls short.  The background with the slanted lines just doesn't fit very well. Aside from the not-so-good graphics, the page just doesn't flow very well.  The login box doesn't even have a submit button and is placed in the main content area. The navigation should have distinct buttons that I do not think should be centered in the container. Search field has same problem as login, misplaced and lacking a submit button. The news boxes just don't fit in very well and the bottom just doesn't make any sense to me.

 

Sorry, just my $.02.  If you did this through a competition, mind posting the contest link?  Did you use 99designs.com?

[HaLo2FrEeEk]

Sorry about the last link, here it is.  This is pretty much the final design, I just have some minor changes to do, but the design itself shouldn't change at all.  The person who submitted it has put in some amazing work done in photoshop, so I wouldn't say that he has limited PS skills.

 

http://infectionist.com/images/misc/newCI_preview.png

 

And I didn't host the contest elsewhere, I hosted it right on my site, through the forum.  I had a few other sites mention it but it was still done on my own site.  You can read through the thread though here:

 

http://infectionist.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1016

 

Compared to the rest of the submissions, this was the best.

 

As for the login box, it's negligible, since I won't be using it, and the search box, either I'll add a submit button, or the users will simply press enter to search, it's not that hard.  Buttons are unsightly anyways.

 

And the background, who said that the whole thing needs to be perfectly parallel, that would be ugly.  It was better than the white background he had there before, and the colors perfectly match the rest of the design.

 

I appreciate that you said something about it, and I know you were just giving your opinion, but it might seem like I'm being short, and that's because along with telling me what you DON'T like about it, you could have said what you DID like about it, or what I could do to fix the problems.

 

We weren't trying to go for any metallic look, we were just trying to improve what we had.  Do you think that the old design (the one we have now) is better?