building my first site for someone comment on design and need some advice

Martin_Man

Martin_Man

Martin_Man

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Hey guys

This is the first time im creating a site for someone other then myself. My dad's friend is offerening me £100 to build up a site for his business which is a project manager. I was just wondering if someone could comment so far on the colours and layout aspect.

Click here

i need some advice now...

when it comes to getting hostage and domain do i have to pay for it or does the person who want me to build it have to pay for it?


Thanks

Martin
 
reflux said:
Looks OK; but you might want to brighten the red a bit to give you some better contrast against the black.

Also you've spelt 'management' and 'interiors' wrong :)
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Bad start lol thanks


Well I chose that red as that’s the colour of there company logo. Could it be possible to change the background? Lighter or darker?
 
Draeger said:
That certainly stands out a lot better. I would suggest going for a smaller sized font though, that looks too big to me?.

I don't know why but I really like the simplicity of your logo at the top btw. I'd say the "interiors" part should be moved slightly over to the left towards the "e" in "Cove" though?. Looks a bit too far away. :cool:
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ok working on it now....

hows it now?

Thanks for your advice earlier I get what you mean but once you’ve created the site shouldn’t everything be passed onto the company including domain and hostage?

what do you mean "interiors" part should be moved slightly over to the left towards the "e" in "Cove" ?
 
Last edited:
I have actually done something even better and created navy bars instead. I just learnt how to do it and it seem’s so much easier to control and maintain
 
Draeger said:
Looking better now the font size has been scaled down a bit. :cool:

Where you have "interiors" in the main logo at the top, to my eye it needs moved slightly over to the left nearer to the "e" in "Cove". Not by much, just a small amount, as below :-

okye8o.jpg


Don't pass everything over to the company, no. Because if something goes seriously wrong with the site online, their first port of call will be you to fix it. ;)

So you need access to it not only for that reason but for any updates to the site that may be required. You need to be able to FTP the files up and down to the server hosting and its much quicker and less hassle if you take care of that end of things.
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Ok I shall sort out the text :)

I get your point; I shall set it all up in my name and charge an annual fee.


Yep - looks good mate

One think I've just noticed - it looks like you're using PNG images with alpha transparencies for the background images. These are not going to work in Internet Explorer 6 because it's a crap browser and doesn't support PNGs with transparency; people using IE6 will see some horrid dithering effect.

If I was you, I'd just change the images to have the same grey backgackground as the main page so they blend in and won't have this problem
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Thanks I never knew that I shall sort that out all tomorrow as it will take to long now.

This may be something really simple but I was just wondering, where I got my nav bar at the top and when you scroll over it nothing happens. I want the text to smoothly fade dark gray. How can I achieve this?
 
kkbigal said:
Yep - looks good mate :)

An idea for when you've finished the deisgn and it's ready to go - consider signing up for a Google analytics account so you can track who visits your site; should be useful for the management ;) - www.google.com/analytics
It's dead simple to use and comes with full instructions on how to get it working. Once you've signed up for an account, all you have to do is paste about 3 or 4 lines of pre-generated code into the pages you want to track and hey-presto!
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when you say useful for the management are you talking about my client?
 
Draeger said:
Do you mean "mouseover text"?. So that when a viewer hovers their mouse cursor over the nav bar text it changes colour?.

Also, just out of interest, are you hand coding the site using Notepad or similar or using a WYSIWYG Editor like Dreamweaver CS3?.
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yes once you hit the box the text fades to gray or if you hit the text the the text fades gray one or the other.

to be honest, i am using Dreamweaver CS3 but i've learned to actually code most of the stuff on my own now. Whenever i need help or want to quickly view my work i can. Is this a good or bad thing?
 
Nope with a few tutorial lessons i learned to do the nav alone. what is Spry?

I do tend to only use Code section of DW. I suppose in a way it also helps me to keep all the coding nice and neat rather then all over the place.

The hover code you sent me was what i wanted works great thanks mate :)
 
kkbigal said:
Spry is an AJAX framework that was incorporated into Dreamweaver in version CS3 onwards.

AJAX is basically using javascript, XML etc to produce more dynamic and richer (and in cases efficient) web applications - animating stuff without using Flash, retrieving data without having to refresh the web page etc.

Google Maps is a good example of AJAX in action :)

I moved away from Dreamweaver after version 8 to Visual Studio, so I never had a good look at the new additions. I think the Spry framework lets you create animated navigation bars and other stuff :)
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I heard XML is a usefull thing to learn i may just give it a go, do you think its worth it?

Is Visual Studio any good? How comes you changed?
 
I feel proud with all the good feedback especially as this is my first time I’m building a site for a business and I’ll be continuing working on it. :D

I'll change the text in the navigation box smaller and the little glitch with the table shadow I can easily fix that.

I got hold of the client today with this example and he replys back saying 'This is exactly how i was expecting it!' so hopefully that’s a good sign :)

still got a long way to go yet
 
Treemonkey said:
good tip!

If your developing sites and see other sites with cool features or css styling then its worth checking out firebug which is an add-on for Firefox you can inspect elements to see whats what. Its also great for finding mistakes in your own work :)

I recommend it, its awesome for finding out what styles are conflicting etc

Treemonkey
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i am hunting for it now
 
If you look between the home page and the service section why does the DIV position change? I don't understand this. It must be to do with the css and the DIV positioning.
 
What I mean is, if you look at the home page the page is centred, but then if you click on the services link the page creeps left slightly but that only seems to happen when the scroller on the right appears
 
Eulogy said:
Some critiques from me:

Not bad for a first design, nice to see someone not using tables!

I would say the site design needs to be larger/wider, typically 960px wide is considered a good size for a site

I'm not digging the logo for some reason. it just doesn't seem to work very well to me

I think you need to be consistent with your font colors, for example some of your text is white and some black, but it would probably looks better if it was all one colour (i'd say white > black on that site colour scheme)

I think you need to fix the site nav bar a bit, on some pages you see different items which doesn't make much sense! if your navbar is static like that you may want to look at using Includes to attach the same nav bar to every page (ASP/PHP includes are fairly straight forward)

You have a contact section on the homepage and a link on the navbar also to a contact us section, my advice would be to ditch the contact section on the index page and just have the contact page from the navbar, it may be worth while to add the phone number somewhere on the homepage for the lazy among us though

I think the navbar text/buttons need to be a bit larger, say 15-20% bigger

If you click 'services' then there is a gap at the bottom between the content div and the footer (this is in IE 8.0 with compatibility mode turned off, with this on it's OK)

The page is not "centered" properly for me, it's edging towards the left more. Best way to resolve this if you want a centered layout is to create a div for the page as a 'wrapper' and give it a fixed width, in the CSS give it the value margin: 0 auto; to centre it

i.e in HTML:

<div id="wrapper">Content Here</div>

in the CSS:

#wrapper {margin: 0 auto;}

As for how much effort you want to put into it the question is how much you get paid, as you've said you are looking at getting £100 it's probably not worth spending an endless ammount of time on this unless you want to create sites for cash generally, in which case any experience is good experience and i'm sure a good portfolio will speak volumes to potential customers, who will want to see your work!
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Right….

1st, I fully understand about the width of the div table which needs to be wider but from using a small monitor screen it’s hard to judge how wide I should make it especially as most people these days have 22inch screen or whatever.

2nd, For the colour theme I’m doing it all based on the leaflet they have provided me with and its white, black and red which they told me to keep it nice and clean.

3rd, As for the navigation bar, service, contact me section goes These are only rough copies of my work to get people’s opinions on what they think. I have just got the hostage now and will be concentrating on getting everything perfect.

4th, I have fixed the problem now so its all correctly in the middle of the browser.
 
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