heebie walks

Well, first off I'm not sure what you mean by 'walks'.

you mean hikes?

I think the top banner is too tall also...it takes up too much space...it could be about 1/2 the height or less.

not thrilled with the logo either

I also think you can blend the adsense ads...personally I think you should try to blend the borders to the background.

On the upside, I think you have a cool concept for a site. It will be neat if you get a few thousand submissions.

You might want to look at google maps too...not sure if that is what you have but you can put all sorts of markers with the right code and coordinates

I think the overall feel and scheme is good, the logo is poor and pixelised though, the ads are bit too "slapped-in" if you know what I mean, on the left alternate colors of pale yellow and white, I think it's better if you alternated with a darker shade as opposed to the white one. Overall, nice looking and has a good potential...

Hello there!

First of all I like the idea and the orange. It really pops.

• I agree about the ads - the ads that are in that middle column feel like they are in the way. I would put them to the side.
• The logo is very pixellated (sp?) and there needs to be more of an identitiy. The header is too big to have nothing there.
• The login at the top and the bar on the left look yellowish to me. (just an FYI). I know that there should be a difference in colors on the left (yellow and a bit darker) but I can hardly see it. Try making the dark a bit darker.
• The whole site feels "loose". The different areas are not seperated enough? There is too much space between items in those areas?

Make sure that you post back here and let us see how it is coming!

Thanks for everyone's comments! So I think we're all agreed on a couple of things:
* That the ads need to blend in more
* That the logo needs to go and replaced with a picture that gives the site more identity
* That the colour scheme could be changed
* That the header is waaaay to big than necessary

i'm happy to go ahead with all of this, except it's a standard CMS template with limited WYSIWYG theme options - I feel I'd might have go with a completely different template.

Here's what I can change in terms of the colour scheme and what it's set to at the moment:
* Base colour | #ffe23d | I think they fade this / dilute it with white because the background's really not very strong
* Link Colour | #a9290a
* Header Top | #fc6d1d
* Header Bottom | #a30f42 | just generates an image dynamically with these two colours
* Text Colour | #494949

Just try any changes you can make... I bet theres a css lurking over that default theme for cms of yours... You can go from there...

Yes - realised what I was saying was a bit pants - there's gonna be a CSS file which I can manually edit...