I need a serious review of our project-in-development. Gambling/sports betting relate

[petrosc]

Together with another 4 associates, we have hired a small team of professional coders and graphic designers to develop one of our projects.

This specific project, is a Football(soccer) Betting/Gambling portal, which is supposed to make a revenue from affiliating with casinos, poker rooms and sports bookmakers.
I will try to provide some basic info on this website(to get you in our spirit) and at the end I will explain what kind of advice I need from more experiensed developers in the forum.

For the content side, we will be providing the following FREE services:
1. Expert betting strategies, match previews and betting tips for the weekly football matches of the major leagues.
2. Reviews of the 15 Best Bookmakers online along with links to their free bets offers.
3. Expert gambling advice for BlackJack, Roulette, Craps and Slots, mainly focusing on BlackJack and Roulette strategies. We are writing our own series of publications in the form of ebooks about various gambling strategies. We have the BlackJack ebook ready, we are working on the roulette eBook now.
4. Reviews of the best 14 online casinos, along with links to free cash offers.
5. With time, we will add a poker tutorial but for now we will only provide poker articles along with a basic "How to play" guide.
6. Reviews of the 15 best Poker Rooms online, with the free cash offers.
7. Monthly newsletters with new free bets/cash offers from our affiliate companies.
8. Other related info.

About the designing side:
There was a long discussion with my assiciates about what kinf of theme we would give to our site, at the end we decided to give our website a touch of humor and named it BetLoonies.com. We hired a professional cartoonist to create a mascot for our site, which would be also used for the logo and I must say that he did a very good job. Through this design, we tried to give the impression to the visitor that we are "crazy about betting".

Although this website is not online yet, I have two layouts as a draft example of what it should look like.

Layout 1:
This is the main page

Layout 2:
This is how the reviews page will look like. At the left hand side next to the reviews, there will be a list with the casinos/bookmakers reviewed, where the visitor can click for fast navigation. On the right hand site, next to the reviews, there will be a banner(replacing the current ones) next to each casino reviewed.

What I need from fellow members, is a review and general advice. For example, advice and opinion on the content, what can be changed, added, or removed. Or about the design, how does it look like? Can you provide me with some advice how to imrove the looks and feel of the site?

I will appreciate your honest opinion, thank you
Petros

p.s. Very sorry for the long thread, but it was necessary to give you a good idea of what this site is about


Update 1.5.06 : The design of the main page is finished, you can check it out here. Looks much better now doesn't it?

 

[petrosc]

nobody?

 

[Bender]

the header looks nice, the cartoonist did a great job indeed.
IMO, the rest of the template (below header) looks too "templatish".
I'm sure your team will "fine tune" it before launch.
Otherwise a pretty cool concept, can't wait to see it live!
Good luck!

 

[petrosc]

Thanks Daniel, this is just a draft, when it the site is launched let's hope it looks less templatish. The original template was a corporate template, the team did a good job so far masking it

 

[noelius]

Well, the header is really nice, but be sure to write elaso the domain name in each page (maybe the pic is a bit confounding).

The rest of the website? It's a template, you know. The quality of this part will depend of your changes.

 

[POLiSH]

Look's very good .. Good start .. Going to be an intresting site. Keep us updated when the content comes to life!

 

[petrosc]

I am aware that this is a template, we could not afford to have the team design the website "de novo". Instead, we chose to try to mask the template. When the banners are in place, it will hopefully mask the corporate looking template.

Any suggestions that would help hide the templatish look?

I am glad that you all like this website we are all very excited about it. I will keep you updated and post here to let you know when it is up and running, so don't unsubscribe from this thread.

 

[POLiSH]

Template look is fine, just fill it with unique content.

 

[petrosc]

anybody else?

 

[PrezKennedy]

I would go with a font style for the horizontal navigation bar that matches the logo at the top, or at least has a similar cartoony feel to it. Of course it still needs to be easily readable, but it would remove that corporate template feel.

 

[KING]

I like only cartoon.. Everything else looks unprofessional... If you are going to run a business site you need better layout.

Good luck

 

[petrosc]

I would go with a font style for the horizontal navigation bar that matches the logo at the top, or at least has a similar cartoony feel to it. Of course it still needs to be easily readable, but it would remove that corporate template feel.

nice remark, never crossed my mind thanks

I like only cartoon.. Everything else looks unprofessional... If you are going to run a business site you need better layout.

Good luck

I could not afford to have a layout 100%(for example $250 like the one's you're selling) customly desgned so I had to go with this one, but the examples I showed here are very early stages of work, it will contain more pictures, banners, it will be more user friendly.C'mon it's not that bad is it?

I will udate you all as soon as I have the page ready to see the difference. Of course, you are all helping me out here with your advice.

 

[petrosc]

thank you everyone for the advice, Please, have a look at the final look of the main page.
Of course the banners will be replaced by real ads and the ones that are not ads will be replaced with better graphics. But in general, this is how the page will look like. What do you think? Isn't it better now?

http://www.betloonies.com/home.jpg

p.s don't mind the spelling errors they will not be there when the site will be launched