From Paper To Life
Image A
Image B
Image C
It's one thing to draw out your idea on paper and another to make it look right on the screen. To be successful, you should break down your project and handle one aspect at a time. It is very tempting to add new features and make changes as you go, but try to finish one thing at a time and revise at a later date (unless of course the changes would dramatically effect other aspects of the site). To get going, we broke the site up into 4 major areas (Image A):
Now it was time to start designing one area at a time. Each day, Eugene and I would shoot across design emails. Neither of us had any design experience, so we just did the best we could. We wanted to begin with the most complex element; the navigation tabs (Image B) which we put together in Microsoft Paint. We had over 150 date activities and we had to find a way to logically organize them. After looking through literally thousands of CSS menu options, we found a design that we instantly connected with.
Don't be afraid to use other websites for inspiration because every great idea is inspired by something else. If you want to design a unique website from scratch, try to find other sites that you like and incorporate some of the things that they do well. This does not mean actually copying them, but you will be surprised how far you can go once you have that initial idea. For example look at how we went from this design (Image C) for our home page to what we currently have now.