Can you critique my site?

[kevindosi]

Hello hello,
I've posted on here about my site before, but I've just recently finally got around to finishing it. I was hoping some of you could critique it, give me some tips\suggestions, or just insult it flat out. It's the first website I've created from scratch and is just a personal travelog for friends and family to follow. Still, I'm kind of enjoying this whole web design thing and would like to make some tweaks where necessary. I think I can generally make it look the way I want it to, but I don't have much of an artist's eye and don't know what to do to make it look good. So if you have any suggestions for functionality or appearance, please let me know.
http://www.beforethecubicle.com/
Thanks in advance!

 

[RMo]

I would say it looks quite good. Nice job!

One thing I did notice, though, is that you have a lot of inline styles in your source code (e.g., style="foo: bar;" attributes in HTML tags). This affects the user's experience in absolutely no way (aside from maybe an insignificant increase in bandwidth required), but for your sake, you may want to externalize all your styles to your main style sheet(s) to make it easier to maintain--but what do I care.

Other than that, I think it would look a bit better with a small amount of padding around your maincontent_content div (or however you want to do it). Around 1em looks good to me, but you can use an approximate amount in pixels if your design would work better with that. (Too much, however, and your right third of the main content falls off the side.)

But again, it looks great--just a minor idea!

 

[miles01110]

19 validation errors in your HTML, might want to start with those.

HTML Validator

When you're done, you have 52 CSS errors.

CSS Validator

 

[adamfishercox]

validate your code, and add some padding / margins around the content, there's no margin to keep the eye focused on the text.

 

[kevindosi]

Thanks for the suggestions, everyone. I definitely do need to add some padding. Most of those validation errors came when I switched to wordpress, so I'm not sure what to do about a lot of them.
Is it just me, or does it load reaaaalllly slowly? I'm not exactly sure why. I've looked at sites with comparably large images but it just seems like this site is really slow.

 

[Dal123]

Don't them valdiation errors always come up? Every site I check out always has validation errors (usually netscape ones).

 

[design-is]

Don't them valdiation errors always come up? Every site I check out always has validation errors (usually netscape ones).

Nope, they don't show up if you've coded everything right

Saying that, I see most of the CSS errors come from plug-ins etc, so there's not much to worry about with those. The HTML errors could be addressed though.

Site looks good. I don't have anything else to add at the moment which hasn't already been said

/Doug

 

[RMo]

Don't them valdiation errors always come up? Every site I check out always has validation errors (usually netscape ones).

As others have said, no. When you code a site according to the spec the validator checks against, you will not have any errors. Many of the ones on this site seem to be mismatched paragraph and DIV tags, along with some other problems.

What exactly is a "Netscape error"?