I click this link and see a wall of text. Bullet-y text to be sure, but text. I don't even think to scroll down to see the artwork below the fold. My eyes don't really read your text; they're just looking for some indication of something I can click on to <i>actually see the thing</i>. They find "browse"; I click that, and now I'm actually in your app, and I'm thinking "what-the-hell, why isn't <i>this</i> the first thing I see when I visit the site?"<p>Long story short: find another way to organize the front page of the site. You picked a niche where you get to put pretty pictures on your site. They need to be the first thing I see.
The site looks great. It's very clean, which I love.<p>One of the things I would do is split the main page into left and right and move the "Recent Artwork" to the right of bullet point list on the left. This will let prospective users see artwork right away and you don't really lose anything since there isn't much content in the bullet points anyway.<p>Also, I would lose the captcha for the signup until you have a spam user signup problem. No point in giving people another obstacle to signup if you don't have to. I would lose the "password again" field also as I've never really liked it.<p>Good luck.
I think that your design would be much more successful if it were more visually content-centric. Focus on 1-3 of the best images (I guess based on your voting system) to show off on the front page. "Finally a Home
for your Creative Work!" is too generic. It forces me to read each paragraph below to know what's going on. Try explaining the site in a few bullet points reinforced with descriptive and visually appealing icons. If you try that stuff out I think it would also positively influence the flow of the rest of the site.
Just a side project I just hacked in the last few days. Think of it as Github, except for artwork. You can use it to store your creative stuff, but also to fork and derive from other users and the site tracks the derivative/fork tree.<p>Example of derivatives <a href="http://alpha.artevolve.com/art/view/321667ea2e7a4db4a208980241a58766" rel="nofollow">http://alpha.artevolve.com/art/view/321667ea2e7a4db4a2089802...</a><p>By the way this is still Alpha as still a lot to be done
I would have to say the only thing that bugs me <i>is</i> the many different font styles and colors. I'm not feeling the #B55008. Just giving you my meaningless opinion. :)
Is there any way to search or filter by tag? Right now you can just look through all the photos, but once you have more photos it would be nice to be able to filter them.
I think you should left align the introduction texts and title on the homepage.<p>Also it is not clear if everything on the page is 'recent artwork' or not.