A student in Boston seeking your help. yes you.

Hi ladies,

I'm from hyderabad, currently living in Boston and have been her for the past three years. I just happened to find this website and love extensive it is and how Indians from all over can get in touch with each other so well.

I am a graphic design student working on my thesis right now. My thesis subject is about the immigrant women from South Asian who might be experiencing isolation while living in the United States. May be because of lack of obtaining a job or not connecting with people and therefore feeling left out.. etc. To help women affected by this, I developed a website for it.. its far from done and is only in the development stage but in order to move ahead, I need your help.

Since my website is very much in-line with the objective of IndusLadies Site (connecting Indian Ladies worldwide), I thought taking opinion of ladies having experienced using IndusLadies would be my best bet. Also, it is directed at the needs of a South Asian immigrant, so I need your feedback to know if I am going in the right direction or not.

I have the design right now. I have attached the image of the website here for you to see.

Please let me know what you feel when you see the image. I have a few words here if you like you could use those.. or something else that you would like to say.

Just write the words that best describe how you feel when you see the main page of the website.

Here are some examples a range of feelings: Familiar, Boring, Confused, Eager, Excited, Happy, Hopeful, Indifferent, Interested, Longing, Proud, Sad, Thrilled, Warm, Dislike etc.

Eager to hear from you,
Sapna

hi sapn

i saw the image, it is really exciting and warm.

The color combinations is also very nice.

best luck.

Sapna, I myself am a Graphic Designer . Your home page is a nicely designed page. I feel you need to make a small change as to have '' About Us '' before forum and '' Resources ''. Any visitor to this site or any for that wud like to see who are the people behind the site before actually going into it.Good Luck.

Dear Radhika, Thank you so much for your response. Very helpful :)

Dear Chocolate, Thank you for your feedback. I will definitely work it out. Initially i was not even sure if i should have a "About us" section, just because if this website grows at some point, people would want to know more about each other than the website no? In anycase, that is definitely a helpful feedback.

Thank you so much you two! :)

I'm waiting for more responses though.. so if you know of others who would like to give their feedback, please direct them here.. its very important for my thesis. I'll be ever grateful to you.

Hi Sapna,

your homepage looks very elegant and attractive.i too like the color combination.Its very warm and pleasant.if i may ask,why did you choose that backdrop image (is it a saree picture-blue color one?) and how it is relevant to the content of your website? I'm just curious


pavi

Sapn, I hope you saw the Moderators Comments to you, in your profile.Please act accordingly.
Love,
Chithra.

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"><meta name="ProgId" content="OneNote.File"><meta name="Generator" content="Microsoft OneNote 12"> I felt excited like in a festive mood but also cool like down-to-earth calm feeling. I guess it was the bright oranges and the muted browns that made me feel this way.

Over all, I was a bit confused about the background though like it caught my attention lot more than the actual content. Maybe if you make the background more transparent or perhaps darker with more shadows then the content would be stronger but with both of them like this now, my eyes are more pulled to the background than the actual site.

I feel that the white box with "Join...Boston" seems incomplete and out of place with the rest of the festive colors and intricate details in their backgrounds. Also, the white font color for the text in orange backgrounds doesn't attract attention as much as it should. My eyes seem to take longer than necessary to make out the text because of light font color on the cheery light orange background. Perhaps you can try the pink font color on orange background and see how that goes?

Similarly, the register and sign in on top didn't even register to me because it seemed to blend with the background of the header. I was looking carefully on everything and then noticed it. I'm sure you might want to make it more visible to first time users so they can register easily.

And I'm sorry to be blunt but the brown colors for the background of the bottom content area seem washed out especially when the richer and darker brown is in the left side in the background and catches more attention from the start anyway.

I feel like the left side of the background with its dark brown colors seems better suited to be background than the colorful and eye-catching blue background colors on the right side. Perhaps you can crop/resize/play with the background more to have only that brown colors and designs without any blue to catch the eyes. You could use that colorful and pretty blue instead of the washed out brown background in the bottom content area.

The thick border also looks washed out especially since its near the warm and rich brown background color.

Do you know about this site? http://colorschemedesigner.com/ You can use color picker add on in firefox browser to see the hex codes for the colors you used and use the given site to see the best complementary colors for your site design. You could even choose the right shade for the font colors and/or backgrounds easily with it.

I'm a web developer so really looked at the site hard. Sorry to show lot of criticism but I feel this site will be just amazingly perfect if you could address the problems I raised up. Hope it was constructive criticism for you. Overall, it definitely had an indian feel to it. Good luck!

PS: If you like me to see it again after you finished it, feel free to post here or send in pm. I don't mind giving reviews.

Thank you all for your feedback.

Dear Chithra, thank you for directing me to that.. since I am new, I tried to read as much as i could and didn't find anything related to my query so i innocently went ahead with it. I apologize and end this poll here. I completely understand and respectfully abide.

I will just respond to the kind helpers and end this at that.

Dear Pavi - Thank you for your feedback. About the background, i had used a different one before but my professors kept wanting it to look "indian" and actually suggested me using a sari as a background even though I said that it would confuse.. I guess this makes it clear that that was a bad decision as i suspected.

Dear Serenity_John - Your in depth feedback was also very helpful.. thank you so much for it. It was exactly what I was looking for. I will make those changes and will definitely contact you for your input. The sari issue is as i mentioned earlier, was mostly done to please the professors.. but i will remove it since its makes pretty clear that it only confuses. Thank you so much again.

Very much appreciated.
sapna

Interesting - Want to explore more - Looks like a fun place - Women to hang out with - Seems secure!

These were the first thoughts. Please launcha proper poll, asking the admin. You will get excellent, insightful reviews, comments from it. And on the BG, the sareeis quite misleading.

Good Luck,

Arch

Dear Arch, Thank you for your feedback.

I got the permission of IL team and have been approved to go ahead with this thread. :)

Indus Ladies,
I look forward to hearing more about all your opinions and perspectives on the design.

I agree with the sari in the background. I still have to get more opinions to be able to convince my professors of my decision of not using that in the background.

Other than that, if there is anything else you can think of? please feel free to share. Words that come to your mind when you first see the page..

Thank you so much.
Sapna