My first original design...any thoughts?

This is my first completely original website (other then the picture). I am just trying to get some feedback about it.

Let me know what you think

thanks

http://astrobond.comze.com/online/

 

Clean and simple.
- Post title: Move it a little bit inside.
- Social button: remove the border.
- Header: Perhaps black would make it even better tone.

 

thanks for the ideas, I like them

 

Agreed with black tone.

 

what exactly do u mean ?

 

The black tone would probably mean to give it a little more contrast by adding a black bar, or a deeper black to the gradient. The 'Sign Up' button does seem out of place. I would consider a gradient button with more of the red-ish color the logo is using. Also the bold red links at the right don't look great... I would consider making them CSS rollovers with light grey buttons and keeping the icons. Maybe a red-ish hover color.

 

are you talking about my website?

 

It looks good, nice and clean and simply

 

It's not bad... on small fonts/96dpi systems, but you should test what it does on LF/120dpi since the layout breaks. I'd also play with the padding a bit more since a number of things are running right into the border edges that probably shouldn't... But from a design perspective I've seen far, far worse - as a first go you did rather well.

Shame about the code though - CENTER tag, extra DIV's for no reason, classes on elements that don't need classes (like body), horizontal rules doing border's job (since you aren't using them as a break between sections, but just to divide the header from it's content - that makes no sense!), or even the nonsensical heading orders. Is "Top News today" a subsection of "Sink all downloaded music to itunes"? No it isn't... So why is that a H3 and H4? Is "sink all downloaded music" a subsection of an image tag? You don't even have alt text much less content in your H1, and you skip right over H2 (which honestly, it looks like ALL your other headings on the page should be)... Much less that <div id="title"> nonsense for what should also obviously be a heading tag.

BTW, the abbreviation is Sync, as in Synchronize, not Sink as in Kitchen. - yer gonna run a tech site, git yer thar terminology right

Though at least you made and attempt at using P for paragraphs, H1..H6 for headings, and unordered lists for lists. That's more than most people manage just starting out. You learn a bit more about semantics, heading orders - and learn that nonsense like clearfix is unnecessary/wasteful and that, well... George Carlin used to joke that not every ejaculation deserves a name; in that way not every element needs a DIV with a class on it around it.

There are a lot of advanced techniques - like "Gilder-levin image replacement" and "sliding doors" I would suggest making your next priority to learn after getting a handle on things like heading orders and semantic markup.

 

i) You could remove the border in follow us images in the sidebar..

ii) I am not sure what is the contact-us doing in the header ? Is it a link to hyperlink to contact us page ? if so I couldn't find the hyperlink..

iii) Could have reduced the width slightly to avoid horizontal scroll bars (while in 1024 x 768 resolution)...

iv) Title of your page...

v) remember - border radius dont work yet in IE...

vi) dont use tags after </html>

Other than that.... gud... and very simple design ....

 

I like the font style and logo. I Trix comments are valid and frank.

 

nice, but keep margins consistant in all those boxes

 

Well I have seen the site and its looking nice.

 

It looks sharp!

 

I have seen the site and its looking nice.

 

That's a very clean "web 2.0" ish design. But yes, agreed with everybody:
1) If you have time, look into having W3C syntax validation (google for w3c validator)
2) I would say the single most important thing would be to set a <title></title> other than "Untitled Document" for SEO
3) Second most important would be to have the follow links actually follow a specific twitter/facebook/etc account and not take me to their homepage

Other than that, visually it's stunning.

 

I strongly suggest optimizing that repeating background image a bit - it is very very big:

size: 296.18 KB (303,288 bytes)
dimensions: 2,550px × 3,300px (scaled to 618px × 801px)

You may also consider adding some padding & margins to the main content area to keep the text from hugging the borders. I really like the teal on black-ish ambiance. I would suggest expanding on that as well! Be creative!

 

That blue line bothers me for some reason. Also, give your page a title. Right now it says untitled document.

 

I like it. Nice and clean )

 

Pretty decent, for your first try, but your code needs to be improved a lot.
Good luck and keep up the good work