Blah websites

[Nifty62]

Hey all,

I'm putting together a website that has tutorials for PHP.

The problem is that I just don't have enough website design experience to know how to make the site look anything more than "meh".

They always seem so dull and boring and I don't know what to do about it because I'm just not that skilled with that side of web design.

I want my site to look clean and professional but also to look appealing and "neat."

Any tips?

Thanks!

 

[Phreaddee]

want to show us what youve got and we'll go from there.
live link - thats my first tip!

 

[Nifty62]

Alright, I'm going to say upfront that this is not even close to a complete website.

http://phptest.net16.net/

That being said, even though this is only a rough layout of what the site would look like, it is more or less what my sites end up looking like. Very blah, no character, etc etc.

When the site is complete, the words on the left will of course be links to those tutorials and on those pages the navbar will have links to the different sections of the tutorials.

Thanks for any help and advice you can offer!

 

[Phreaddee]

open ended % sites are a bad idea. if you want to do fluid, you've got to give it some parameters. 10%,80%,10% on a 27" imac (2560px wide) will look disastrous whilst on a 1024x768 or less reso screen it will look too cramped.

for a start try 20%, 60% 20%
give your wrapper a value of 960px;

set a font style on the body tag ie in your css
body {
font-family:Arial, helvetica, san-serif;
}

default times new roman always looks ugly on screens!

add a doctype to the html
and a charset is also a good idea.

as for your left menu

  <ul>                     
<li><b>Tutorials</b></li>                     
<hr align="left">                     
<li>HTML</li>                     
<li>CSS</li>                     
<li>PHP</li>                     
<li>Javascript</li>                 
</ul>

this is wrong. picky as it might be, you'll need to do something like this

 <h3>Tutorials</h3>
<ul>                     
<li><a href="#">HTML</a></li>                    
<li><a href="#">CSS</a></li>                     
<li><a href="#">PHP</a></li>                     
<li><a href="#">Javascript</a></li>                 
</ul>

make those few minor changes, and then lets see what it looks like.


</span>

 

[Nifty62]

Alrighty.

I knew that the menu would have to be links, it just don't have those pages set up yet so I didn't bother making them links.

But anyway, I made the changes you suggested. It seems a little cramped to me, especially the main content column. Maybe it's just me lol.

EDIT: Ok, I'm uploading the site now. On top of the suggestions you gave me I have also added a little bit of content that I've been working on so that we can get a better idea of how it will look with words on it.