New Website Design - Feedback #2

[sidebar]

My main issue with the redesign is that the main content starts "below" the fold. Breakdown:

Eyebrow: Useless for people like me, just takes up space. I understand it's just *advertising* for curse, but it's still advertising. Option to turn off in profile would be nice.

Header: Logo / Search area waaaaay to large. Reduce logo by 30% to 50%. Make better use of space ... like throw the banner ad up there.

Menu Bar: Fine, maybe a little bit tall.

Recent Area: Waaaaaay to large, above the fold. I understand it was done to accommodate / set off the Ad, but it's really really cheesy looking (move it to right side bar sharing the _main_content_ space for just that much).

General: I know you really want to the content to be full width, but you have so much "non-content" that it's pushing the main reason people come to the site below the fold. Matter of fact, with some people having 3 or 4 bars in their browser (yahoo, google, developer, etc) I would bet they might only see the "Title" bar of the main content ... if even. That's bad.

Take the Header (reduce size), Menu, Banner, Recent and make it 2 columns (or 3) ... then go back to single column for the main content. You will have to change where you have the "patch" buttons, but that would move the _main_content_ of the site up to the fold where it belongs.

[aethusa]

<awsome idea: mobile site AND bring back the mmo-champ guy!>
well mobile site would be the one with higher prio ^^

[Deleted]

I really like the new theme, I feel way more comfortable browsing the site now.

If I were to make suggestions for improvement in the design, then;

1.) The bar at the top of the site with links to the Curse network, to be honest I dislike having it there, but if it has to stay, then decreasing the padding between it and the top of the page would make it look better. It should have the same distance to the top as it has to the frame with the logo.

2.) The Blue Tracker and Recent Forums Posts-boxes. At the bottom there are links to the forums and to the Blue Tracker. Don't you think the rows the links are on are quite empty? I believe it'd look great if the row was either removed (placing the links in the headers), filled with a color or, perhaps, if the text was left aligned instead.