High Schoolers looking for advice: How can we improve our website's design? http://thefias.co/

There. Are. So. Many. Ways. To. Answer. This. Okay, I'll try... What is your purpose? Think about what you're trying to get out of your site. You can always ping me, too, and I'd be happy to walk you through some thought experiments and ask some tough questions. Which metric is going to help you achieve your main purpose? More traffic? Make high quality content. Read up on good SEO practices so that people find you organically. Get mentioned on other sites (links, cross post on blogs). There really is no quick, cheap, easy way to get good quality traffic (as opposed to quantity). Sure, I could drive 2,000 people to your site over the next couple of days, but are they your target audience? No. They'd probably be bought and paid for, and then your metrics would drop back down again. So, again, make sure you have awesome content. Good design? Not always directly linked with high traffic. Remember: form follows function. You could do some quick things like find a different Wordpress theme. I'm on mobile and couldn't even read your site. Make sure you find a theme that uses fluid design principles, or Responsive Design. Those are some good buzzwords to get you started on Google. Find a color palette that looks nice. I highly recommend this site to help you find a color scheme. btw - you may have to dive into the HTML/CSS of your site if the Wordpress theme does not allow you to easily adjust color schemes. http://colorschemedesigner.com/ Now, this is where it gets weird, and fun! If you really want to go all out, you can get some inspiration for some designs that were in a whole league of their own here: http://mashable.com/2011/05/15/web-design-inspiration/ You can also look up parallax scrollers. It involves understanding JavaScript, but think back to your purpose. What are you trying to do here? Parallax may also be kinda lame at this point, but I'll leave that up to you to decide what you want on your site. In a two second google search I also found this: http://mashable.com/2013/01/04/web-design-trends-2013/ Not sure how much I trust Mashable for top-top-top-notch advice, but there you have it anyway.

Just a few ideas: - The Contribute link on the right unbalances the page. Perhaps it would be better positioned elsewhere. - There should be some sort of separation between the navigation bar and the rest of the page when scrolled. The navbar and content kinda blend with each other. Perhaps a bit of padding on the bottom of the navbar (as opposed to the top of the content) would help. - There is no sidebar content at all. If that will remain the case, remove it and let the content fill the entire container. - The features on the main page should be the same vertical size. You may need to modify your theme's code to make the text areas all the same height so that the features all sit at the same vertical positions. - Utilize a service such as Google PageSpeed to identify areas where you can decrease load times.

For starters, your introductory pop up message screws up your site completely. The content opens up inside the pop up instead of closing the popup and going to your site, and looks all wrong. Also, the close arrow is on the bottom corner, never do that. Plus it makes the site unreadable on mobile - there doesn't seem to be any way of closing the popup. And people just hate pop ups anyways, they are usually seen as things that get in the way of the actual site, and about as helpful as Clippy, the Office Assistant. People will not go back to your site ever again, if they go there once on mobile, and can't do anything except look at half of a "helpful" message on top of the site. You don't usually get second chances on the Internet these days. And people often visit random sites first on mobile, because they are just killing those few minutes that have to spare. So you need to get your mobile site to work. If you must have an introductory popup (e.g. don't know how to turn it off), keep it small. Like "New to Fiasco? We publish what you want to tell the world. In your craziness, we see genius." And then in the upper corner an x to close. As for the model, you either believe in your idea, or you don't. Does the world need what you are giving? Why would somebody use your platform, what are you offering? Why use Fiasco? Maybe you need the site yourself to express your own ideas and share among like minded viewers? That is a valid reason to keep it running, and see if it catches on. These things take time. If you rely solely on user generated content, you need users to generate content first, but why would you get users without content? So you just need to keep on being excited about the project yourselves. :) -- Edit: As it is now clear that you are looking for free design advice in the hopes of growing and learning, I can commend you for being active high schoolers and wish you the best of luck with your project. Please do remember that Quora as a community thrives on questions that others can use to learn and grow, too. :)