I took over a website, , and I’m kind of a jack of all trades guy in computers (was a network engineer)…I’m not a website guru though. The person that built the site knew less than I do and while the site is ok…I want to redo it and make it better.

I was considering building a fresh new site along side it in a /beta folder or something and then restoring with that database and just transferring the theme folders. Is that doable? Is there a better way?

I’m definitely going to find a nice theme to purchase…any places you guys suggest to start looking? It’s an MMA Promotion site (think UFC but smaller). I am looking for a clean, dark/black looking theme. The 3 things I need to highlight for the site is the upcoming fight card (which I guess I can get from any plugin for the top transitioning feature), News/Press Releases and Events.

Any and all suggestions are welcome! Thanks guys!

looks fine, it looks like most other local mma promotions, does not need to be fancy to get the job done in these cases

I’m not looking for fancy, just looking for it to be cleaner and allow me to have more locations on the homepage to put more content in. Thank you for taking a look at it though!

you are not going to get much cleaner than that

and truthfully you don’t want the homepage cluttered, you want people to stay and look around your site

thanks man

I like it, the only thing I would do to "dress up" the site a bit is to add a slightly contrasting background to the sidebars when I have it full screen it’s just too black..

example.

offtopic, but you said net work engineer? how and what it like to be in that field? i was reading up on the cisco website earlier and took the it4u test, scoring 87%. is this the field i should be looking into?

I definitely think you need a blog to add more content – this also helps with longtail search engine traffic. I’m assuming you like traffic, right?

I definitely think you could use a new theme and a new banner as well. Your first slider image can tell the user what the page is about. I’d also change the title of your page and target a keyword that has good search volume to help with SEO.

The scroll of fights on the top of the page is too fast. Should aslo be a way to manually stop the scroll or click through