Let me start off with this. I’ve met Joe Edwards a few times now. He’s awesome. He’s done a lot of good for St. Louis and the Loop specifically. He sells one of the best hamburgers in the world at Blueberry Hill. …and his website for the Pageant sucks.
I’m not sure when they redesigned this, but I hope it wasn’t long ago because knowing something like this existed in the world for longer than a few days makes me scared and nervous like Sigourney Weaver with the Alien running around her ship.
Maybe you think I’m being harsh. I’m not. Lets discuss.
Lets start with the background image. You know, the one that looks like it came off a zebra running through a bad acid trip. Frankly, this would probably be the least offensive design aspect of this site if the damn thing made it across the whole damn site! It just stops. It doesn’t fade, it just stops…in to yet another shade of purple! …oh. Unless you are on the Links page (for instance), then it cuts to stark white.
Next we have the…paper?…the “I don’t know what its supposed to be” pattern behind the content. Its horrible and it repeats far too much.
Then there’s the red. The horrible horrible red. There’s a reason no one really uses real red on a website: It looks like this and it makes people’s eyes bleed. Wanna use red? Fine. Use a shade of red, darker, lighter, whatever…just don’t use red red and especially don’t use this much red red.
We love you Joe and thats why we have to be tough. A place like yours with just great artists going through it every night (and a great bar that stays open until 3am) deserves a site that doesn’t look like it came from 1996 (For you web geeks, its a table based layout too.)! You’ve been led astray from the web promise land by some kid that owns a computer or some douche that bought “HTML for Dummies” and decided to start a “Web Design Company” to supplement his income from Quiktrip. It happens to a lot of people Joe, but the first step is recognizing the problem.
We just thought it would be best to come from someone that loves your burgers more than anyone.