You ARE Your Site Design!

Since things seem to be going so swimmingly well for most of the business plan that has left to be done, I'm facing the reality of starting a porn site. That is, designing an actual website. We're planning for the site to launch in April (with a teaser/preview site coming sometime in March...!), which really gives me a month to figure out all the back-end stuff (*snicker*). Of course, before there can be a back-end, there has to be a front. Hence my dilemma. How am I going to represent myself and my business in the site's design?

All of my personal business sites--including this blog, despite its not being a "business" per se-- have had a black/red/white theme. What can I say, it's an excellent combo! You have tons of options with it that are practically guaranteed to look good. You can use one colour as the main, another as secondary, and the third as an accent. Use one colour for the background and alternate the other two according to importance of subject. I mean, it is the classic colour scheme. So how in the world am I suppose to make that new? (Or do I even use it at all?)

In reality, the black/red/white colour theme is not limited to my virtual pursuits; a look around our apartment will show you that my personal tastes lean towards dark tones and reds, plus occasional white accents. Look inside my closet or dressers, and you can easily see that my wardrobe is the same (I, of course, provide the white in that case! ^_~). And at this point, well, it just feels a bit... done.

But what does that leave me with?

I'm a perpetual student, and I've studied too much colour theory, marketing tactics, and heck, even feng shui, to deny the effects and social connotations of the colour red. It's the colour of life, passion, lust, and sex. Add to that the colour black--taboo, forbidden, dark, mysterious--and you've practically got "me" in a nutshell. In design, the obvious reason to add white to that mix is that it's about the only colour that compliments both while providing contrast (please, no comments regarding yellows, oranges, or pinks--and if you even start in on blues or greens...). And logic tells me to design a site with black, red, and white. But creativity tells me I need to try something different. Something eye catching, powerful, versatile, and not totally alt-porn cliche. Ugh.

I know I mentioned it some time recently, but I have been wanting to do a green layout. And I'd say that this is my opportunity, except that I don't feel a green layout would really compliment a site of me very well. Maybe I could pull it off here at PF, since this is more words and less photos, but I'm not sure about on the photography site. Plus, my aforementioned wardrobe wouldn't really "go" with a green layout. It's all got to flow together, yaknow? Plus, one of the websites that I've covered in the Competitors section (business is business, not that we can't all work together!) has a green-centric layout. I've thought about doing a sort of revolving layout theme, something that could change frequently, but that seems like it would require too much code work (yeah yeah, I know I suck for still not being caught up on PHP and the technicalities of skinning a website *grumble*) plus I know that StephTheGeek has been doing something similar for some time. I need to find something that hasn't been done, and I have a month to make it work.

Of course, I'm not too worried; I know something will come to me while I still have time to do the work for it. Even if I have to sit in front of a blank paper for a day trying to come up with some rough sketches, something will come to me. And while I'm not "worried", I am a bit tense, as this is something new that I've not really created before. Yeah, I've done forums and retail websites with shopping carts and all; nothing with extensive photo galleries and subscription-based content. Given that, I'd rather get it done sooner than not, just to make sure everything works well. I'll have more ability to play around with it once we start creating content and setting up third-party services. Until then, I'm going to keep biting my lip in contemplation of the perfect colour scheme. Any suggestions?