First Site, need input please

[niconax]

Another Newbie with a new site. Need your input on what to add or delete. It works fine in IE7 but doesn't work to well in Mozzila Firefox. The flash banner shows up, but the navigation buttons don't show up (in Firefox). Any other input will be greatly appreciated

[simpleurl]

Its very 90's. The flash banner isn't really worth all of that code... kind of hard to read most of it. Moaning done. Just change the images so that when they are links they dont have the border round them...

<img blah blah blah border="0" />

Also your site has some very bad validation errors.

[Jason]

I don't really like it. Change the banner, its terrible. To help you understand why, this is how i read it..

Mixing for you since

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1993

Its just way to slow. Also its pretty ugly. Check out good-tutorials.com and make your self a nifty photoshop banner. A good banner is paramount to a good site. A bad one is like putting a bumper sticker on your brand new Ferrari. It just completely undermines the rest of your design.

Continuing down your page... that blue has to be changed. So do the link colors. Erm and the border around your site... it should also be centered.

OK this review sounds a bit harsh as its your first site but hopefully it will help.

Change the following then come back...

Remove the border
Center your whole site.
Remove the (bevel/emboss) on all of your images.
Create a banner image containing one photo that is the size of your right column and use that.
Change all the text colors to something a bit more modern.
Nick a banner effect from good tutorials and put that as your banner.

Doing this will give you a half decent site. From here we can then help you tweak it to make it a good site. Also a good website will greatly help your image. A bad one will do the opposite. I strongly suggest you improve your site.

[phoenixwd]

Sorry, I've got to agree with the others. The flash header is slow and the blue text is kind of hard on the eyes, also the suggestions from Perad are very good. I would also personally remove the counter on your site - there are other ways to see how many visitors you've had (site statistics from your webhosting provider, for example). The counter makes me as a visitor feel like a number and the counter results are questionable at best.

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phoenix

[niconax]

Thanks guys for all the help. I have only been doing web design for 3 months. I really enjoy it and thats why I joined the forum to get some feed back from others that have been doing it longer. I'll make some of the changes noted and then check back to see what else I can do. Thanks for being honest.

[simpleurl]

Even a different font on the home page would make it look slightly better. Like trebuchet ms or verdana

[jameskeeler]

The Good
You have a great attitude. I'm impressed by the fact that you didn't take Perad's comments personally.

Your site seems to have a well-defined purpose.

The Bad
While both of my sites and your site were created with Microsoft products, there is a huge distinction between them. Why? Experience, and a lot of great advice from the folks on this website.

Here are some extremely valuable tips:

1. Flash is a dying animal and someone needs to put it out of its misery once and for all. The animation is very labor intensive and unless you're a VERY skilled professional, the results will be annoying at best. It also doesn't allow blind users (yes, they exist) to experience your site as their readers cannot interpret the animated content.
2. Never design a site with tables, use CSS to accomplish your goals. I still use tables, but only for content that requires a tabulated format, e.g. database results for multiple records.
3. Colors are extremely important and their use should be very deliberate.
4. Navigation should be easy to find, easy to use, intuitive, and should offer feedback to the user, e.g. rollover effects.

Here's how I designed my personal site: I started with a blank page and added the required DOCTYPE, HTML, HEAD, BODY tags and their closing counterparts. Then I began to add some placeholders and chopped up the page into my different areas:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd">
<html>
  <head>
    <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="css/main.css" media="screen" />
    <title>Page Title</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <div id="banner">
      <img src="images/banner.jpg" />
    </div>
    <div id="content">
      <p>Lorem Ipsum...</p>
    </div>
    <div id="footer">
      <p>Copyright 2006 James Keeler.  All rights reserved.</p>
    </div>
  </body>
</html>

The above creates a simple webpage with code that is easily read and, more importantly, easy to maintain. This would serve as a canvas for my page, using the CSS page you then style the page to look however you want.

Point is this, using CSS you divide the tasks of content creation and design, allowing easier management of both. By calling the same CSS page in each page of your website, you ensure that each page will look exactly the same. AND any change made to that CSS page will automatically propagate to all pages on your website.