I am not a professional, but can share my personal experience. (looking at ss5u.png)
1. TimmyOnTime has a shadow and the following text - "time tracking..." does not, besides they have different fonts (I understood later that TimmyOnTime is a logo and the following text is an explanation, but at the first time I was confused)
2. I would make the header text giving the most important message bigger and cleaner.
3. The main picture on the page makes no sense to me. I see 6 different images: Address book? (what does your app do with it?) Adium (I don't know what it is) AOL instant messaging (I am using ICQ, Jabber and Skype) and 3 other images below having no meaning to me. Then 2 minutes later I notice the text explaining that I can use your app with Google talk, MSN and aim.
4. It seems to me that text on your button has more space on top then on bottom (is it your intention?)
5. Your customer feedback uses the smallest font, gray color on a white background what makes it hard to read and notice, I would value my customers most of all and make their feedback more noticeable.
Once again I am not a professional, just a software developer and these are my personal thoughts and impressions.
That's exactly the type of thoughts we're looking for. I forgot to mention that the screenshots were not the actual screenshots we'll use. They are there for the general feel of the "mockup".
With all due respect: developers are not designers, and visa versa. Puts on M$ Monkey Suit, "Delegate, delegate, delegate!" I know you're not a big company, but that doesn't matter — if you're developing a consumer-facing web application, you need to be thinking about UX/UI, branding, etc. The bar is raised, web-app market is ultra-competitive, consumers will ditch a bad looking site.
In my humblest opinion, your current website is better structured and more professional looking than ss5u.png, but that's not to say it can't be improved. I too am not a fan of the color scheme (brown, orange, etc.) but from a design standpoint, it's feels like a complete thought while ss5u.png looks and feels like an unfinished wireframe (as a customer, I'd wonder if your product is unfinished too). However, there are elements from ss5u.png that I think you can merge, like the call-to-action button for one, the lighter color scheme, etc.
I think people mistakenly believe a designer's job is easy, and quite frankly it's not... it's torture. Reading your blog post, I was happy to see you came to the same conclusion. :) People see a clean and simple design and say, "that's easy, I can do that!" but fail to realize the amount of work and iterations that it took to get to that point. Visual harmony requires balance, and there's a reason why few companies can reproduce Apple's simplistic product design. It's NOT easy.
Designers live in a perpetual cycle of NEVER being satisfied because we tend to be obsessive-compulsive. I'm glad you got to experience this, but now I think you should put down the mouse, get back to hacking, and let a professional handle the job. :)
A designer job is infinitely hard to do and I learnt it from our various tries to get something good looking. Maybe I have a dream of being a good designer and that's why I can't delegate it ;)
On your side, what do you do to have a good design?
Every designer has his own process: some prefer to sketch first, some use photoshop as their sketch tool. When people watch me use Photoshop, it's very much akin to hacking because I've got all the keyboard shortcuts memorized like the back of my hand. That being said, I tend to start with PS because I'm faster and it's more eco friendly.
If you really want to be a designer, then you need to teach yourself the basics. Photoshop suffers from being too accessible, so a lot of amateurs tend to ignore the basic universal rules of design. For starters, learn the basics of grid design, information architecture, and typography. There are a lot of great books on Amazon, but you should be able to get a strong grasp of the basics just by googling:
Here's another link that went around Twitter, a lot of simple things (but not obvious to a developer) I think you can apply to ss5u.png such as proper white space / padding, etc..
Like all crafts, you can't expect to be a design god overnight... it takes practice, studying other's work, reading, etc. I think it's admirable that you are learning to design, and if you really love it — keep doing it!!! But from a professional standpoint and as a business owner, don't practice on your company until you're absolutely confident you're up to snuff. If you were B2B product, I think design can be a much lower priority to an extent.
It's also worth noting that you're not wasting your time.
When a designer and developer are working TOGETHER (ie: they understand each other), it's clockwork. You're learning how he thinks, and it will only make you both a better developer and product manager.
you should make Add timmy@timmyontime.com, Add timmyontime
and Add timmyontime@hotmail.com these into links (well i know u can make the one for AIM into a link)
and this is a reason to use the app, not a feature: 98% instant messaging VS 2% web
Type what you are doing instead of clicking in a cumbersome interface.
In fact, you're commenting of the old site. To comment on the new one : http://img18.imageshack.us/img18/2460/ss5u.png . We could make the "add timmy" clickable but it doesn't work well on every computer (in fact, on my own computer).
1. TimmyOnTime has a shadow and the following text - "time tracking..." does not, besides they have different fonts (I understood later that TimmyOnTime is a logo and the following text is an explanation, but at the first time I was confused)
2. I would make the header text giving the most important message bigger and cleaner.
3. The main picture on the page makes no sense to me. I see 6 different images: Address book? (what does your app do with it?) Adium (I don't know what it is) AOL instant messaging (I am using ICQ, Jabber and Skype) and 3 other images below having no meaning to me. Then 2 minutes later I notice the text explaining that I can use your app with Google talk, MSN and aim.
4. It seems to me that text on your button has more space on top then on bottom (is it your intention?)
5. Your customer feedback uses the smallest font, gray color on a white background what makes it hard to read and notice, I would value my customers most of all and make their feedback more noticeable.
Once again I am not a professional, just a software developer and these are my personal thoughts and impressions.