Critique My Website

[montanachad]

My website is not finished yet. The photo gallery is taking, what seems, forever to complete. However the site validates and looks good in Safari, Firefox, and Opera. No testing in IE yet.

Could I get an entry level job doing Web design?

http://chadtudor.org

 

[apsterling]

Couldn't get the page to load. Are your DNS settings correct?

 

[greg555]

The site works for me.

One complaint is the shade of the text. I find grey text on white hard to read. A little darker would help me.

There are also a lot of ads on your front page. If you are trying to sell yourself (rather than just have a fun site) then you may want to get rid of the ads.

Greg

 

[montanachad]

Couldn't get the page to load. Are your DNS settings correct?

I am using Bluehost to host the website, so the DNS settings should be correct.

 

[angelwatt]

Like greg555, I'm finding the text contrast to be bad. The light lime green on white is almost impossible to read as well as the gray text.

Your "About Me" link goes to open a PDF resume, not what one would expect. That's a big turn-off.

The header seems to have a lot of white space.

I'm sure you're still working on it, but your WordPress blog page doesn't match the rest of your site in terms of design.

Your code has some empty tags in various places (at least the home page).

As a note, when using the title attribute on links, having it say the exact same thing as the text inside the link is completely pointless and in terms of accessibility will generally give a person the same information twice.

You also seem to be using the title attribute on links to define acronyms like WPDFD. These should have abbr/acronym tags around them to show what they stand for.

 

[digitalpencil]

Could I get an entry level job doing Web design?

Not bad at all and in answer to your question, yes getting a position as a junior shouldn't be a problem.

A few pointers though, the design is relatively clean and the nav shallow which is good although your choice of title font is a little off and the logo you've used could be better compressed.
Don't link a PDF straight to the 'about me' link, people hate downloading things without sufficient warning.
Wordpress is well integrated, you've managed to keep things relatively seamless but you lose the nav which isn't great.
The photo gallery could be approached differently, using a lightbox or something like that would be a more elegant solution, not to mention, faster to implement.

At any rate, good effort and you shouldn't have much problem getting a position as a junior, just keep plucking at it and show any potential employers that you're in for the long-haul and are prepared and eager to learn new tricks.

Congrats on the baby btw!

 

[montanachad]

The site works for me.

One complaint is the shade of the text. I find grey text on white hard to read. A little darker would help me.

There are also a lot of ads on your front page. If you are trying to sell yourself (rather than just have a fun site) then you may want to get rid of the ads.

Greg

I changed the text to 100% and #000000. About the ads, well, I do Web design for cheaper than any of those ads.

 

[greg555]

The text looks better to me now.

Thanks - Greg

 

[MCRunning]

Adsense looks tacky IMO. It's your about me & family site...I doubt your EPC will be that good anyways. Same with the bluehost banner too. But if you can convince your family to sign up, sure why not. CPA is way better than CPC. Also for the photo galleries maybe make it have a "next" or "previous button". I'm sure it would get annoying if someone was trying to visit your pictures and had to keep clicking "back to album" to see more.

 

[montanachad]

Adsense looks tacky IMO. It's your about me & family site...I doubt your EPC will be that good anyways. Same with the bluehost banner too. But if you can convince your family to sign up, sure why not. CPA is way better than CPC. Also for the photo galleries maybe make it have a "next" or "previous button". I'm sure it would get annoying if someone was trying to visit your pictures and had to keep clicking "back to album" to see more.

I might just use litebox for the gallery. Going back and editing 39 Web pages is a lot of work. I got my dad to sign up for Bluehost.

 

[umiwangu]

<noscript>

Hi Chad, just one quick thing I would add to the site.

As someone who surfs the web with Javascript turned off most of the time, it's nice to know when a website needs JS to operate. Just put a <noscript> notice somewhere on the site to help with accessibility.

Seth

 

[MojoWill]

Could I get an entry level job doing Web design?

http://chadtudor.org

i would say not really if that is your portfolio. A nice start but a long way to go even before an entry level position, if you are serious then do a course and improve your skills