Please review my plan/theme for EssexPortal

[jonbey]

Hi

 

This is not so much a website review request as such, but more of a review for the current plan. I am building a directory / community for my county, EssexPortal.co.uk. For the community side I am using Drupal, and have chosen what I think is a promising theme, Newsflash by Roople. The actual directory is built using a separate directory CMS called Powerseek, and before updating the templates for Powerseek (there are many to do) I would like some feedback on the theme I have chosen.

 

Reasons for choosing the theme:

 

Looks stylish (I think)

Clean and quick to load

No tables

Easily modified (some modifications are built in to the admin panel, ie. column widths).

Has a nice horizontal menu

 

The community site will mostly be articles on "things to do", "places to see" etc. with reader comments. Later I will possibly (time permitting) try to build up a forum (Drupal provides a simple forums as standard) and also invite people to write their own Essex based blogs. For now, it is simple (note that I only recently bought Powerseek, and am still in the process of transferring old "directory" listings from Drupal to Pseek).

 

So, does Newsflash do the job in your opinion? Once I have got the two areas looking the same (maybe even both using the same stylesheets) then I can start to look at the finer points, such as a new logo, tweak the layouts etc.

 

As always (I was jonwade on the old forum) your thoughts are appreciated.

 

Cheers

 

Jon.

[falkencreative]

Separately, I think the two themes work. Neither are all that exciting, but it is a directory after all, so the design needs to be simple and usable, rather than flashy.

 

You definitely need to work on modifying the two so that they are more similar, as you say. At the moment, it feels like I am entering a second site as soon as I leave the home page and click on a listing, and I feel less safe about the site because of the lack of consistency.

[jonbey]

Cheers. I am going to do the update, i.e. use the Newsflash theme on the directory. Fingers crossed I can get this done as a freebie by the software company! Otherwise I'll have to do it myself. Grrr.