My own web design site (draft)

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X_Gary_X

New Member
Hey,
I'm still learning day by day, but I figured what better way to learn, than to work on your my own website. Don't worry about the content, because there will be more, this is just a draft. Just wanted your opinion on the home page design and images I made. Also, anyone know why my jquery is choppy in IE and firefox?

Thanks in advance

http:www.bfwebdesign.com
 
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leroy30

leroy30

New Member
Hi Gary,

I think you should print out your home page and make some objective notes on what looks good and what doesn't.

To be honest, the shadows and glow effects look cheap. I also think you should forget about gradients in your logo and make it either 1) a solid color/s or 2) a very subtle gradient

When you mouse over your menu the cursor is text cursor then hand cursor... use cursor:pointer to make is only the hand cursor.

Your menu type is Nyala then Tahoma but your content is just Tahoma - why? I think you should make it more consistant (besides the serifs on Nyala just aren't working).

Overall I think it's a good start. I like the colour theme and where it's heading I just think there's a few areas that could be a bit more professional.

Keep us posted on the changes!

Le-roy
 
K

kayla

New Member
I thought I commented on this already, but I guess it was when the forum stopped working.

I agree with leroy30 about the gradient in the logo. In the graphic it looks okay, but on the text it reminds me too much of word art in MS Office.

For the "Request a quote" at the top, you have "Request" as the link but I initially hovered over "a quote" thinking it would be the link. I might be the only person that does that, though. I tend to think backwards.

You'll have to fix the Facebook and Twitter links at the bottom, but I'm sure that's something you'll do later (maybe you don't have the pages set up yet).

I would fix the padding around "Call..." and "Request..." at the top. There's more space above the text than below... I would probably try to make it even.

You also use inline styling a bit, and I hate inline styling. Again, maybe I'm the only person that hates it, I don't know. It works though, so I guess it doesn't matter much?

Definitely keep us updated!
 
X

X_Gary_X

New Member
Thanks for your advice. Ya know, I didn't really see what you were talking about with the logo, till I actually changed it, and yeah, I guess it does look more professional. I did change the nav menu back to tahoma too. I just don't want my sites to look like everyone elses, but I guess there are some general standards you need to keep if you are trying to make a site as user friendly as possible.

This is the before logo and nav font:
logoold.png


This is after..what ya think?
logonew.png



And yes Kayla, all the content, and links etc aren't setup yet. i just started this project, and I'm working on the design, then I'll set up everything. I may add a twitter feed too...idk yet. Thx for the comment with text padding...didnt even see that!
 
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T

thewebexec

New Member
Some good improvements there Gary, I'd be wary of having soo many background elements to everything. Take a look at some minimalist sites just to see how they manage some of that.

Also in your main content div, text that sans the page looks ancient, block the text to take up 50% or some of the left hand side, then use the rest of the space for a contact us form (always best on the front page rather than under a sub link) and maybe some testimonials, goals, achievements, or perhaps even blog posts.
 
D

d a v e

New Member
the drop shadows on the text are too heavy

favicon missing

don't like the rollover on the nav because the text is replaced with the same text

did you really underline your heading so it looks like a link?!

your site validates as xhtml (btw it doesn't look professional any more to put those labels there) but it's only for a transitional DTD - why not strict?!

the "your site" text looks tacky like Word Art ;)
i don't like the stars or points of light in the header

use proper quotes around "your" (why have you got quotes or inverted commas there anyway??)

i quite like your revised logo but the site as a whole looks a little dated
 
K

kayla

New Member
d a v e said:
don't like the rollover on the nav because the text is replaced with the same text
Click to expand...

To go along with this, I've seen a few sites that have a nav similar to yours, but when you hover over "Services", something like "What we can offer you" comes up. I've seen it done poorly, but also very well.
 
ronaldroe

ronaldroe

Super Moderator
Staff member
Much better!! Just make sure you're optimizing those images, because it loads pretty slow.
 
X

X_Gary_X

New Member
yes, I plan on it...I'm just getting the "look" down first, then I'll focus on the optimizing my images/code etc. I still have lots to add...just not a lot of time lately...but I'm working on it

Thanks!
 
leroy30

leroy30

New Member
Hi Gary. Awesome improvement!

I just ran a test using www.pingdom.com and some of your images are massive and doubled up. bf44 and bf55 look exactly the same and they are over 600kb! You background image is huge too - since it's a tiled pattern you could make it small and have the browser tile it. Same for the logo image it's way too big.

Total size of the images mentioned above is 1738.3kb I managed to get it down to 156kb without really doing a lot. Here are my versions...

banner
background
scenery

I'll keep them up for a day or two. Feel free to use them. You could easily shave more off the size but at least now they are a more realistic size for a web page!

Keep at it! It's starting to look pretty good :)
 
krymson

krymson

Member
it looks nice, it looks a little out dated, maybe its the boxish feeling i get. This is just me though
 
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