Old Site Being Given Facelift

Hello Everyone,

I have an existing site that I needed to move in a new direction and am taking that opportunity to also redo a bit of the layout and offerings - it's petsiteguides.com. The old site is still up and running; the new one can be seen by adding /directory to the URL.

Please keep in mind there are still some things to be worked out - the highlighted site in the right column may make the whole page go out of whack if the picture is too big, I know there's a listing that should not be in root, the listings still need formatting and I will be getting rid of or at least changing the big green and red buttons for the listings.

There will be content on the homepage above the category box like there was in the original.

I guess what I'm looking for...

Is the change in color a good thing in your opinion?
While I want to make it less directory-like, did I make it too blog-like and perhaps harder to identify what the site is?

The change is good but you still need more things to make it look better. Maybe change some fonts and make borders more modern.

Thanks for looking it over Nikolas.

Are you thinking more fonts to make the various sections easier to identify or different fonts than I am using completely?

What do you mean by more modern borders? Do you have an example you could point me to?

Sorry for the late reply,

I think the color is OK

I would make a distinction though between background color
and content color, a different shade of black for either of those
will give it a new look (IMO)

And as Nikolas suggested fonts are hard to read
I realized you are using Arial which I don't like that much

but if you want to stick with them use
at least for the letters in the "PET GUIDES" box

.categories{
letter-spacing:1px;
}

because the look to close together
and this will separate them a little

Thanks Giorgos for the suggestions. I like the text/background color idea, will have to play with that a bit.

It's been taking a lot longer than I had hoped to get set up. It seems like every time I cross something off the to-do list, I'm finding two or more things to add. Oh well, just part of the joys of being a webmaster.