[FoxLeader]

Let's make it short & sweet. I have an aviation community (personal project) I want to redesign. It's for all kind of aviation: airliners, fighter jets, helicopters, general aviation,... specialized for Canadian & Quebec, but it's still worldwide.
There are videos, technical specs, glossary, news, links, pictures, forums,...

I started at least 15 designs I threw away because they weren't worth to continue or just which just didn't satisfy myself.

Do you have any ideas that would help me get started? Any existing designs you feel could be of good inspiration in my situation?

Thanks!

[goodwebdesigner]

I had an aviation related domain once and ended up selling it. But I think with that pictures are worth a thousand words. I would put up pictures of the cockpit and fuselage especially with the learjet 45's they are nice inside. Perhaps close ups of the rotary blades on a chopper. Work with that and see what you come up with. Then design a template around it. Seems to work for me anyways.

[FoxLeader]

I thought about something like this, but what I don't like is that then the pictures can't be easily changed.

Ex: it's the Armed Forces Day, so I just changed the pictures so they're all military planes.
Ex2: It's the rollout of a new plane say the 787 Dreamliner. I change the pictures so they're all Dreamliner's.

I attached a few designs I started but never finished because I wasn't satisfied. For some, only the header has been done. Please don't car about the content, I didn't take everything. I mostly took things from the web for that mock content.

[FoxLeader]

That's the last unfinished designs.

Comments, tips, advice? Which one do you like best? (note that there's big blue space in some designs. Those are meant for ads).

[FoxLeader]

Ok. Now I started working again. After looking at my last tries, I think the color schemes I used kind of... sucked so I looked over the web for inspiration and ended up on Adobe's Kuler.

Here are some I liked, I would appreciate your opinion on those:
kuler
kuler

[Revenant]

I would try and shape the actual design around your content. Sit down, what do you want on your site? Forums, articles, news, photogallery etc.? These will all shape how your site is going to be shaped. I have posted this before, but when creating mock ups this is how I work:

1) First I sketch out a basic site design for the layout on a piece of paper or with my wacom into photoshop.

1) Then find as much sample text as i can, if I need some lispum is always a handy alternative, and paste a whole bunch of it into my html file.

2)Then I create a bare bones css file and markup the html how I would like it to be presented eg columns, sidebars, header, footer etc. without the fancy graphics.

3) then I take a screen cap of the bare layout, paste it into photoshop and apply the graphic elements around the text etc. to make sure it all works.

4) Slice and dice, into dreamweaver / whatever your using to code with, and then code it up!

Hope that Helps

EDIT: As for colour schemes, colourlovers dot com is a pretty good site for colour ideas, and you can always check out some colour theory lessons on the net, I havent tried that Kuler app but it looks pretty sweet