New site under construction

[ljm]

http://chrisbrewster.co.uk/bush

That's a temporary location until I have everything sorted out and can give it its own server and domain.

This is an entirely serious project, before you ask. Seriously.

I'm cashing in on the latest trend and going for web 2.0 looks (large fonts, rounded corners, short blocks of text etc.). I can't really put this in How's My Site, since it's nowhere near complete.

Do you think there's any improvements I could make before I go and finish the thing off?

[sdlifecycle]

It kind of lacks excitement. Regardless of the topic, the font is boring. The header is pretty decent so go off that. Use some different fonts and maybe try a gray font and incorporate colors from your page header design.
And what's with the "not got an account?". Not proper english. Neither of those links work. Usually its a good idea to have a more thorough site to display before asking for feedback. I learned that the hard way as well!

[solidgold]

Rather a niche market dont you think?! I'll second about the font, is it tahoma? Also a more practical way of viewing the images is a good idea, rather than the just open in new window bit.
I honestly cant believe that this is serious, unless there is a secret group of bush lovers that i dont know about...

[ljm]

It's a prototype so far, literally 'starting out'. No point creating a whole site with a crap design, when you can get a lot of opinions off one page.

I'll fiddle around with the fonts, it's Geneva or Verdana, can't remember which. I'll have to get more rounded boxes in and stuff, use the grass effect more.

The font is actually a big problem for me. Or the size, should I say. I'm keeping it very strict with regards to standards, so I'm using h1, h2, h3 and stuff. I want the fonts to generally be large, but in parts want it smaller without shoving the text in another div. I could make paragraphs have small text, but I don't like the idea of shoving a paragraph of text in something like h4 to make it larger. The less code the better.

The image thing is space filler. I have plans to have a page for each image with comments, description, some profile info etc. Kinda like Flickr or Youtube. It'd be silly just linking to an image. I'm tempted to use an idea like Piczo uses with the collage of images, but that's getting ambitious.

I am deadly serious though. One goal is to get to the top of Google search with it, pushing down all the George Bush sites. I'm planning the technical side on paper (databases, file structure and stuff), and I do believe getting a good infrastructure will be very, very hard as a one man job. My god, it gets more and more confusing. Especially since I don't know javascript at all to do any fancy, trendy AJAX stuff. If I can pull this off in its entirety, I'll be a proud man.

All advice has been heeded though, I'll keep trying before I go any further with the coding.

[ljm]

Made a lot of changes now. I'm thinking it looks better but still needs work. Changed the font to Trebuchet, with Verdana as backup for the computers that don't use it.

There aren't many good looking web-safe fonts when you're going for large text

You'll notice that I heeded your advice and changed the font colour to a shade of grey too. I'm leaving the navigation black though.

One question though: The banner. Do I have the banner itself as a background image and the site name as text, or another image, or leave it as it is? I'm not sure I'm quite comfortable with people being able to highlight the entire header.