Well it's been a long time coming, and a few obstacles to overcome along the way, but we're getting there with the new look DN Trade.

The purpose of doing a redesign was to cater for the future.

We don't just want to be a simple domain forum - we want to expand our offerings to cater for internet marketing generally. Our domain market
in Australia is growing fast, and we want to be part of it.

(But for those of you who simply want the forum and nothing else, that will still be an option).

Some of the new features will include:

• Guest articles
  
• Regular blog
  
• Job marketplace (matching domain owners with Aussie service providers)
  
• Tools and resources for domain owners
  
• Improved Forum offerings
  
• RSS feeds

But we'd really appreciate your help please ..........

We have a live demo running at the moment here: http://thevbninja.com/dntrade/

Feel free to click around.

It's right at draft design stage, so there are obviously a lot of things still to be done and added (and some stuff we definitely don't like!), but we'd
really appreciate your input on the site generally. Better to get it now than later.

Constructive suggestions and critiques on design / colours / layout etc would be most welcomed please. 20 heads are better than two!

Cheers, Ned

My suggestion is to get rid of the dark blue header background and same for footer, just go with white background you have atm.
Other than that looks good so far.

Don

Hey Don - thanks for that, it is a good suggestion.

What do you think of the use of a bit of colour elsewhere in the site? We're trying to make it bright and cheerful.

I reckon you'll have plenty of colour with the advertisers banners mixed in, maybe the menu bar background could stay, but would need to see, it's a bit hard to visualize atm.

Don

Well you know how they say a Women takes just three seconds after meeting you to decide whether they will sleep with you or not. (Or something to that effect), as soon as site loaded, it lost credibility for me. Mainly because of the number of advertisements near the fold.

I think instead of having 2 add units under the fold, you should have one 728x90 which aligns right. And the remainder space on the left could be like a “breaking news” kind of section.

I also think you should get rid of the darker gray area. And bring the white area right up to fold. So its a bit more free flowing.

Other than that, everything else looks pretty great. Looks like a big future ahead for the forum. Keep up the good work!

Like the new look! I would agree that the header and footer could be lighter - it's tricky to see the footer links for one

Apart from that - good stuff!

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Buy, Sell and Snap Australian Domain Names @ Netfleet.com.au | The .AU Aftermarket

I can't remember back that far ............

But all good points - thanks Ben. The designers put those ads there - not us. So please correct me if I'm wrong, but are you suggesting we do something
like we currently have? CrazyDomains up top (big); DomainSponsor below aligned right?

Hi Ned

Our tester viewed the page width in the browser's Firefox , Chrome & IE on a 15' monitor with 1024x768 resolution and it seems too wide having to scroll to view data, perhaps due to margins within the layout. Although most persons nowadays have larger monitors.

Cheers

As long as it's easy to navigate, has good contrast between text and background colours and the font size is easy to read then I'll be happy... all of which the new design seems to be at this stage.

Ironic for it being a .com.au site, I can barely see Australia in your header graphic hidden behind the crazy domains banner.

When r u upgrading to latest version of VB

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Managing Million Dollar Sites since 2004