A lot of nit-picky things, but you've put a good effort into getting this far so the rest should be relatively painless. Your design itself is very clean, with some changes to the content you should be in great shape.
Home Page:
A lot of your experience and current work is not related to web design. This is the catch-22 of every starting designer, you need experience to get work.. but you need work to get experience. Unfortunately, this is going to take some investment on your end. Ask around and see if anyone you know has need of a website, or be willing to make some at a slash-discount rate. Your portfolio is what will help land you a job, not recommendations from people that know how good you are as a kitchen hand or office worker.
Along with that, sell yourself! You might think you're only a 5 out of 10 at XHTML, but compared to the next guy off the street you're a god. Instead of rating your talents on a scale of 1 to 10, boast about how many years (or hours, if necessary) experience you've had working with each technology. As you read through the skills you've written about yourself, do they sound impressive? To someone that can't do them, they are. Talk about yourself like you're a new product in a magazine.
Change the title across the top from Richard's Online Resume to something a bit more authoritative, like Richard Hayward | Resume . And get rid of the disclaimers that say "information subject to change or become out of date." It comes off as careless - employers want to see that you're actively staying on top of your game, and that includes making sure that links and information are accurate.
Experience:
Ace bottle printers and Nouveau screen printing are probably your best places of experience to showcase to future employers. If you have any samples of designs you made for them, include them here. The other jobs are unrelated to the web design field and almost make it seem that you're not good enough to stay employed as a designer. I've been in that situation, and it's a hard field to break into - you can mask this a bit by dropping out the unrelated jobs, and write paragraphs about your work experience instead of listing the dates you worked there.
"Richard has hard earned experience in the design field by working at both place X and place Y. He has spent X amount of time doing Y activity and has learned skill Z, the way that only real word experience can teach. He is currently employed as a freelance designer (even if you don't have current clients, this can be true!) and as a hand-crafted pizza designer (you can address your currently employment in a tongue-in-cheek sort of way) at pizza place X."
References:
This page can either be dropped entirely or reduced to
pull quotes from these documents - if an employer wants to see references, they'll ask for them. The button you've chosen for this page on the navigation bar reminds me of a restroom, I might consider finding a different package of designs.
web links:
I wouldn't trash this page entirely, but there isn't much content on it. Once you have work for your portfolio, links to your work would go here.
contact:
The contact and web links pages use times new roman while the rest of the site does not. I'd consider using the same font across the entire site, and to put more content on this page, maybe a paragraph about why they should contact you for a job.
I'm a fan of the design though. Best of luck with things!
