My site help

Hate to be harsh, but its terrible :D

From a design, code, SEO, usability, accessiblity and almost everything wise.

Its got a very outdated look and feel to it..not to mention the php errors on the contact page. Your squashing the images down instead of using thumbnails and they are not clickable. The top header is amateur looking.

To be completely honest and brutal, I'd start over again from scratch.

If your struggling for design ideas, take a look at some template sites and try to take inspiration from them. I dont mean steal the design outright, but take little bits from everywhere, take the idea behind it and build upon it.

Sorry if it hurts but dont worry, even the best of us web designers and developers were terrible to start with :)
 
Ah, thought so. I put too much effort into this haha. I might make another or just give up all togethor. I don't have the time, or the money to get someone to build one for me.

Before I posted the site I forgot to upload the latest site to the server so I know the gallery isnt working and putting a 3mb image as a thumbnail isn't going to work. And I dont have any gallerys uploaded yet so I know they aren't clickable.

Thanks.
 
Have a look at Wix.com if you need a flash website that is literally drag & drop, reasonably cheap if you don't fancy the completely free version - a dodle to set up,

Mark
 
I'm playing with joomla atm, as my last attempt at home build looked like yours but with diff pics :D
 
Hey it might not be an award winning design but you built it yourself and for a first try it's pretty damn good so well done. Having said that, you should consider it an experience in learning and now address the points raised here.
 
OK now I have a few minutes I can make some suggestions. I know you said you dont have time to do the site again but clearly you want one otherwise you wouldn't have posted here for us to see right? :)

OK start at the top. The banner is ok. It will do and if you decide in future you dont like it thats an easy thing to change. However for now I would say it is too big and takes up your page too much. I would drop the refected part of the logo text which does nothing useful, and reduce the height of the banner.

The menu buttons are a bit iffy. Always remember, just because it's possble to do something with a web page it doesn't mean you should. Your menu would look farbetter if the buttons weren't there. Just have a strip of grey with text for the menu items and make them change to a slightly different shade on roll-over. And not red text - the only time red works is on a white background but even then it doesn't look very nice. Far better to go for white on grey here.

The main text is way too big and thats not necessary. It looks cheap that way and you would be better to reduce it significantly. Better to have lots of blank space on the page than fill it with big text. And leave space at the sides. Your text butts up to the adge and it looks cramped. You need to set a margin to give it room.

Pictures - always resize them to the size you want them to appear on the site. It's easy to do and will speed up the loading of pages. There are then plenty of free softwares that will create thumbnail images for you to link from.

Always remember - less is more. You're not running a commercial site so make the most of the lack of advertising and keep the pages clean. The main purpose of your website is to show off your photographs so don't create pages with colours and graphics that distract from the purpose.

There's nothing wrong with a black and white web page - the colour is in the photographs.

Hope that helps :)
 
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