Help making a website

I have a serious question, how can I make my site better? This site that I made is for my Senior project and I need it to look nice in order to graduate. The main goal for the project is to review a bunch of movies and spend time looking at each one. The icing on the cake, is to actually publish those reviews, so I have made this site just for that purpose. I am new to making my own websites, and I don't really know HTML. The site itself is a wetpaint wiki for those that might know what I'm talking about and looks decent right now. If you are going to tell me I need more reviews, I already have them written I just need to have them edited by my "Mentor" of the project before I actually publish them. Any tips would be great thanks.
http://theyorkerreview.wetpaint.com/

The background.. What are you? French?

Background has a poor color scheme. Looks like it should be an uppity school's banner or something.

The main page should look more like a portal. It needs to have really open links to everything you want to draw attention to, not just a little intro with a billion ads (I know there's not much you can do about the ads, but try to disguise them as much as you can).

As far as the actual coding goes, that's something you need to bring up with Soul or someone who actually cares about sites. Since it's for a project, I suppose the only part that matters is aesthetics, but if I were your professor and I saw you made an entire site on your own, completely customized, etc. I would be a lot more impressed than the standard Geo-site kinda thing. Then again, that's for the dedicated types.

Is this background better? I am kind of stuck with about 15 possible ones, and I don't know if I can make my own, kind of looking for that now. BTW I know it looks "Urban/Cityish" ,but I felt that worked for a review site based in Seattle.
I just wish I could change the color schemes from grey.....
I'm also trying to figure out how to make the home look more like a "Portal", but as of now, I haven't published enough stuff to do that. Plus I have no real members/viewers anyways, except for the panel I have to present my work to.

I like it way better now. Grey ftw.

You said you just have to publish your reviews, so I'm assuming few people (only nerds) did websites?
If so, talk to the nerds, and see what their websites are like.
You don't need a good website.
It just has to be better than theirs.

I actually never really wanted to do a website. I wanted it to be in the newspaper, but I got kind of lazy and didn't contact anyone. The thing is due at the end of April, so I can't do that anymore or at least publish all of my reviews. I've made pretty good ground since I have put 30+ hours into it just this week (spring break). I'm going to be gone in a couple of days for a week long vacation to Italy though so I need to have it done. On the bright side, one of my friends is doing a newspaper every other week for his project and he said he could get at least one of my reviews in.

Color scheme is much better, I like the simplistic, yet very aesthetic, style. However, the main title leaves much to be wanted (should make it look more banner-like) and the dark colors make the ads stand out even more. Also, the contrast between your sidebars and the main body is too great. Perhaps it would be a good idea to tone down the white to something a little more neutral.

I like it as well, but I think the white is too white (lol) and you need a slightly darker color, but the color still needs to be neutral.

Now I get to sound like a pain. The colors are good, but your banner.. the font on it doesn't seem to fit. Also, might I suggest centering the links at the bottom. All those Help, Terms of Use stuff. It would make it look more offical. As for the color scheme, I like it. The ad doesn't stand out as much from when it was gray.

I was never a fan of bright websites. This is not necessarily a bad thing for most people, but when I am on a website I prefer to have nice mellow colors, not bright blues. Most people will probably disagree, so you can just ignore me for now, but I honestly preferred the gray, it did not hurt my eyes so much. The white is still too white, as well.

EDIT: Also, of every movie in your list, I have only heard of one (well, I've heard of the titles of others, but only cause of their original versions [ie Rambo, Horton, etc.]). You should probably start reviewing stuff people will actually watch.

Err.
I've heard of all of those movies, but okay.


PS: I heard Rambo was really good. Never bothered to read Joe's review, unfortunately.

Those reviews were actually made for all movies that are either new to theatres or to DVD. I know that they might not be especially well known, but I wanted to keep the theme of new releases and did my best to pick some of the better of each genre. If you look at my site I only have four reviews up, but in my movies section you can see all the movies I have reviewed. (Most aren't edited yet so I can't publish them.) I have Rambo as my action movie, Sunshine as my Sci-Fi, Horton hears a who as my family film, and The eye as my horror. I have also finished writing reviews for Sweeney Todd as my musical, King of Kong as my documentary, The Mist as an additional horror (To help the garbage that was the eye....), and love in the time of cholera as my romance. Obviously those last bunch haven't been published because I need to see my mentor for editing.
As for the banner, I will try to fix the font, but it took me absolutely forever to find a decent image that wouldn't look stretched when posted. I had to do a lot of tinkering in photoshop and I've never been very good at photo editing. I also changed the background color scheme of the page because the banner covered the tops of the buildings and you could see the bottom "stubs" which looked pretty bad. Look forward to seeing a review for 3 10 to Yuma as my new western and Appleseed: Ex Machina as my new anime/foreign film. After that I think I'm going to be done with reviewing movies as I probably only need ten and that is about twenty hours of just watching videos right there, let alone working on reviews, site, etc.... Then I got a reflection paper to write and then a presentation for the panel. Not too bad for under a week =)

Yea I win the interweb =P

OK, so I will say some other stuff besides background or whatever. First, if you can, on the front page, rather than having a link to the "What's New on The Yorker Review", maybe put a few bullets below it with the 5 most recent things. Then, I would suggest putting your contact information either on its own page, or put it at the bottom of the page rather than in the middle. You could put something else in the middle, such as recent user-submitted reviews. Staying on that topic, my old website had a page where you could submit your own reviews, and that would put it in a special admin-only place and the admins could either approve, edit, or just reject the review. I also think that the ratings you use should not be yours, nor the critics on the other sites, I think they should stay as what you set them at until the movie gets rated at least 10 times then average the results. Also, maybe within the "Movies" section, put some pretty main subsections? (Action, Scary, Comedy..)

Well those are my suggestions from what I have seen with websites looking nice. Good luck.

Yay darker blue background...but I have to put earplugs in to look at that blue mid-section there with the contact info, etc. Also, you should make some contrast. The blue-white theme has been done to death, so you should throw in some colors on the opposite end of the spectrum: orange, red, yellow, etc. Don't make it big chunks, though, cause that'll just be ugly. Just make a few eye-catching parts that you want to stress: important links, banner, etc.

I hate it when my posts get cut off...codejoe just read the last post on the first page >.>

Don't worry Soul, I saw it. The biggest problem with the color for me Demo, is that because it is not an HTML site ( I don't really know how to use HTML anyway) I can't really change the colors apart from the 15 choices they give me. I was also a little confused about the "earplug" thing you said, do you not like the color for the tables? That is one of the few colors I can change.


"What's New on The Yorker Review", maybe put a few bullets below it with the 5 most recent things. "

I actually intended on doing that from the very start, but the RSS feed I keep on trying to put there won't work. I have some contacts that know how to do it, but it'll be a couple days until I can find out. I don't think I can do user reviewed work either, since I don't know how admin powers work for the site and would rather not have some strangers mess with my project. Thanks for the help guys I think it is going to be pretty good at this rate.

You could put a picture of yourself on there.





Oh wait, you wanted me to give you good advice.

I actually considered doing that, but it didn't seem like it would be very important to the actual site.
Plus if they actually needed to contact me, they could always use my contact info that is right on the site.

I wanna see you

No you don't, trust me.

If you want you could just look at my myspace I guess. There is a direct link in my contacts section.

T4r marsparse.