What do you think of my site?

[wfoster]

http://www.wfoster.co.uk

Only taken 7 hours in total to make. Pretty basic, I am starting off slowly.

Is there room for improvement? Throw me your compliments and criticism, I would love to hear it. Thanks.

 

[FieryFurnace]

Just some tiny stuff that I noticed when checking your site:
1.) the warning on the about page -> the red background seems a little too strong and the gray font is hard to read
2.) the IM and email graphic (msn.gif and email.gif) are too large -> you should use photoshop to make them the actual size that you need on your page -> that will bring the loading time down
3.) the skype graphic (skype.gif) doesn't exist on your server

Nice and clean site altogether.

 

[miles01110]

The background graphic jumps around depending on which page you're on. The navigation link is too small. I find the color scheme dark and with not enough contrast.

 

[paprgypc]

your website

I am relatively new to website design and have received a lot of help from a forum for users of Serif webplus X2. I would suggest going to a site like Serif forums and look at some of the sites that are being generated with some software. The users have lots of good ideas on how to make sites look better.

However, from what I learned they always talk first about the organization of the site. Then they talk about the content that goes into it. Then they talk about the color scheme, font, pictures, etc.

So, based on what I have learned my first impressions are as follows:

1). The dark background and dark, small font make it very difficult to read what you have on the pages. I had to hunt around before I found your tabs.
2). The font in each page is also too small as are all the pictures that are included.
3). What is the focus of your website...what are you trying to do. If it is a blog, then there is a template someplace you could use and still incorporate your background.
4). There is no need for the warning especially in red.


I am not sure what software you use. But, I would encourage you to go and join some other ones that are more focused on website development. Hope this helps.

When I posted my site on serif forums I received 26 replies with some very critical, yet kind comments. I still am in the process of going through the comments and implementing. Help is out there.

 

[Dmac77]

The background graphic jumps around depending on which page you're on. The navigation link is too small. I find the color scheme dark and with not enough contrast.

My thoughts exactly.

Don

 

[joph]

I felt very hard to differentiate the fonts from its background as both of their colors are too dark. So change any one of them to light shade as it is too hard for any one to read the contents of your website.

 

[greg555]

It seems to be very dark overall. Also, all the content is contained in a little square in the middle of the page (at least on my 20" iMac screen).

Greg

 

[paprgypc]

Website review

I talked earlier about the help of the serif forums. Here is a link to the forum and the review that they gave my sight.

http://forums.serif.com/showthread.php?t=54144

Here is a link after I made some of their suggestions. Not all suggestions are implemented.

http://www.robscustomcabinetry.net

 

[vivithemage]

http://www.wfoster.co.uk/about.php

get rid of the red, it's realllly hard to see on that black background.

maybe shoot for a lighter background too? I have always found black background websites...kind of bland and hard to look at.

 

[DaReal_Dionysus]

Please don't take offense as this is corrective criticism not an attack. But that site need a ton of work. It's hard to see. Fonts to small and says nothing that would make the average person want to have you do development for them.

 

[tsuru]

I pretty much agree with all that's been said. Also I think adding some padding around you main content would help in bringing focus on the content.

 

[brasseale]

I'm not sure what program you used to create this site, but it seems to be about 4 years out of date. Your site relies heavily on tables and tables tend to render differently across browsers and behave poorly with regard to SEO.

Bottom line, restart and get rid of the tables. Learn html and css. http://www.htmldog.com is a great start. Head over to the envato websites like http://nettuts.com and other websites talking about table-less layout.

Sorry for the harsh facts, but the reality is no self respecting web designer creates sites using tables anymore. Certainly no company is going to hire you on to create tabled websites, so it would be best overall to learn the web standards. Good luck and if you need any help send me a private message. I am always willing to help out.

 

[a cat *miaow*]

I'm not sure what program you used to create this site, but it seems to be about 4 years out of date. Your site relies heavily on tables and tables tend to render differently across browsers and behave poorly with regard to SEO.

Pedantic I know but tables render pretty much identically from browser to browser. Your site will not be SE friendly just because you use CSS. Building your site with semantic HTML which is styled by CSS is how to make a SE friendly site... there are plenty of sites out that use table based design and are very highly ranked (last time I checked Amazon were doing pretty well).

 

[angelwatt]

(last time I checked Amazon were doing pretty well).

Well, in defense, Amazon doesn't really rely a whole lot on search engine results to bring in people. They only occasionally come up on my searches. There are plenty of sites with table layouts doing very well for themselves though. A good product or service is 10x more important than SEO for a web site.

 

[a cat *miaow*]

Well, in defense, Amazon doesn't really rely a whole lot on search engine results to bring in people. They only occasionally come up on my searches. There are plenty of sites with table layouts doing very well for themselves though. A good product or service is 10x more important than SEO for a web site.

Fair point, I just thought of the most obvious example which I know is table based. I just always find it bizarre on these forums when someone posts their site for critique and they get replies telling them they need to ditch their table layout as though it's a solution to everything.

 

[FourCandles]

http://www.wfoster.co.uk

Only taken 7 hours in total to make. Pretty basic, I am starting off slowly.

Is there room for improvement? Throw me your compliments and criticism, I would love to hear it. Thanks.

I'm only commenting on the design here, others have made suggestions on the coding side of things.

OK, whilst I like the logo itself, and the concept of the black logo on graduated grey, as others have said there's not enough contrast between logo and background. Easy enough to fix.

And yes, I'd tone down the red disclaimer. To be honest I'd probably tone down the wording itself - the BBC News site is very high profile and their disclaimer is more simple (see "RELATED INTERNET LINKS" in the right column of most stories).

But overall, not bad at all for a personal site and certainly much better than I could have done at 14 years old (even if the web had been invented then )