I agree with bmscmoreira, its fatal making promises or commiting to a project if you haven't got the actual tools needed, I never announce anything unless its at least 75% done now, then if life throws a spanner in the works its easier to catch up
Theres a quote which fits very well

Regarding the website, in my humble opinion, it looks like a default/standard/free joomla template with a modified header with a nice logo. For all the work you've put in this project, I think Thea Render deserves better.

Of course there is a lack of showcase images which will hopefully be the main feature of the website, as discussed before on another thread.

As being a webdesigner myself, I hope I can help you to make things better, so here is my 5cents, from top to bottom:

- if you want a clean and sleek design, get rid of unnecessary things like:
time&date, text-size, balls on menu navigation. everybody has a watch and can change fontsize on their browser.

- get rid of unnecessary pdf-print-email icons on article listings
(noisy, ugly, distracting, can be available when viewing full article)

- create hierarchy of website items. At the moment, the top navigation has less relevance than the login form. The top navigation looks gray and faded while the login form pops out! Even the text-size of the login form is bigger than the top nav menu.

- login button red, forgot password red, forgot username red, login red. It's drawing too much atention. Maybe login could be small thing, grayed out, at the right on the header: visible, sober, not in the way of content.

- replace "last updated" with "updated"

- replace "Tuesday, 01 December 2009 21:14" with something smaller like "01/12/09". Hours and minutes are not that important, i guess, so away with them.

- also article time and date take huge amount of space and relevancy, floating (with a lot of void around it) underneath the title.

- syndication: there's a box all-width, inside that box another box, then a Title, then below an icon and a feed link. A small link/icon as part of the footer and/or header is usually enough. Again, hierarchy and relevance - that where most free/standard templates fail.

Usually the stronger the grid and the lesser the layout elements, more the content stands out. Then, it's all about contents and nothing else.

The cleanest webdesign I've done was very visual and demanding as the architects wanted a very minimal design to make their content standout: mopet.nl
Of course my blog is not like that (it's crap really), but it's not commercial either.

That said, I believe it is fairly easy to make it better, keeping most of what you have.
Also the top nav might look beatifull with red links instead of only when a:hover.

Best regards,
Vasco

for what it's worth, i would agree with Vasco - in this field, less is most definitely more. one small thing to add to the list is:

replace '"The News" with just "News". the former sounds - and i think gramatically is - wrong.

on a lighter note, i'm really looking forward to trying out Thea so keep up the good work!

I think this website is great and really good to promote an architects work. but in case of thearender I would prefer something graphically more appealing. for a renderengine such a minimalistic design would feel a bit... pale, colourless to me.
I would much more like to see something that emanates light and brightness and contrast; like orange/golden writing on dark background.
I do agree with you on several other points though. like the fact that the header is not important enough yet and hierarchy is very, very important.

Well, I love the color choices. Personally, I bleed red and black. Go dawgs.

Vasco did a nice review. Being familiar with Joomla, I find myself always using this workflow: select template, program functionality, then CLEAN CLEAN CLEAN. There are so many distractive things...

Hi All,

Have a question and don't know if it was already mentionned in a previous post : Is it in your plans to make a material repository for Thea ? like maxwell or other render did ?

Absolutely. But it will be available after release.
giannis

hum hum... I know always same thing but now it's a few week you make use salivate about this famous release...how about a precise date for that? soon or very very soon?
sorry to distract you from working...

Well, I won't characterize it as "famous release", it sounds rather bad.

I can say that the release will come 2-3 months after open beta and open beta will come between 5 March and 15 March. But we will go for a public announcement and an exact date when everything is ready.

best wishes
Ioannis Pantazopoulos