Lighting the LAMP

Top10Reads had a facelift!  Now, an over statement, I’ve never been too good with user interface work. Starting with Designing Interfaces: Patterns for Effective Interaction Design I hoped to gather some nuggets (or magic) to help improve the site’s appearance.

In the end what helped most was going back to the sites that I liked the best. This time to figure out what stood out on those sites. To check out if there was an idea to take from their site layout ( the header, content area and footer etc.) or color scheme.

Two free tools that helped are I Like Your Colors which allowed you to enter any URL and provided a list of colors that had been used at that site, and Kuler a free tool by Adobe that lets you enter a color code (or pick from an existing schema) to find matching colors!

The before and after screen shots are below.  The new UI uses a single content area marked with a round border. What do you think?

Top10Reads Old User Interface