Layout feedback?

I really like the front page a lot. Awesome colour combination - provides a striking yet sophisticated effect. Love it!

After that the inner part is rather disappointing. The photos on the front page really made that layout "pop". It would be great if you could find a way to either bring those photos in, or find another way to add orange, red, and/or yellow to this design. I also think that something's not quite right with the navbar. It's a neat idea but I'm finding the text a little hard to read - slightly larger font sizes and more spacing between elements would help, but I'm sure it was difficult to get that to fit into the violin shape, so I'm not sure what you should do.

IME, drop down menus usually tend to be absolutely positioned, which makes it hard to put them anywhere other than the left side of the screen (unless you're good enough with javascript that you could hack the script.) I haven't worked with these in years though so maybe things have changed.

Megan,

Yeah, I'm finding the interior a little "dry" also. I'm hoping that this is due to lack of content and that the photos and images enroute will provide some life. Otherwise I might take your advice and try adding some of those warmer colours to the scheme itself.

I've just been thrown some revisions to the structure which might allow me a little more freedom for spacing in the navigation cello (not a violin ) - we'll see if that helps.

Exactly my experience with dropdown menus also!

I agree that start page is good (little slow to load thou).
I think the inseide pages could come alive with content and pictures as you mention but also agree the navigation needs to be lighter and/or bigger. Could you make the cello more brown?
The links at the bottom (text ones) I'm a little unsure about, seems you've used the visited link color for the link, and link color for the mouse over. it's making me think if i've been to those pages or not. you also might want to add a link to the top of the page.

nice work, keep it up

looks really good IMO...

Me thinks a lighter colored background would look better.

Nice work taff as usual.

I disagree, I think that the grey on that page is what helps to add the level of sophistication. It's the combination of the sedated gry with the bright blue and oranges that makes this layout really interesting.

I agree that the darker background works well with the blue but I think it's the white on the inner pages that doesn't work so well and loses the umph of the first page. Where do they want a drop down menu and why? It looks good as it is, although a little slow loading.

Nice

Very nice work! I particularly like your unique navigation.

Thanks for the feedback folks. I've had content flowing in all day via email and will probably get working on this in earnest next week. For those that found it slow - hopefully that is just the unoptimized graphics talking and not my liberal use of tables.

That navigation is a really messy Imagestyler-generated table but the only way I could keep the thing NN4 compatible.

This is my last NN4-friendly site - Enough is enough!

I pretty much agree with everything else that's been said - if you could add some more color to the inner pages, perhaps under the nav bar or on the page header, that would make the page stand out much more.

Looks very nice! I'd tell your client that sites using the drop-down menus usually have a severe lack space problem. It's never as nice as actually seeing all the navigation choices if you have room, IMO.

Peter