Review my site please...

Hi,
I've been freelancing for a few years now, and have finally taken a shot at having my own website. It's a bootstrap core with some custom js effects. I used both original and and stock pictures. The site is www.front-end-developer-josh.com .

lmk what you think.

I'm also going to be adding a few more aspects to the site like a few hand coded pop-ups and a blog as well.

 

I think its nice and clean and has a great flow to it.

The only thing that got me was the domain name. Might see if you can come up with something shorter to make it easy for your customers to remember.

 

Cool, Thanks for the feedback! I've been kicking around a few...

 

*WARNING* I don't rap, I don't jive, and I sure as the hell do not sugarcoat things so as to blow smoke up your backside as it's clearly apparent everyone else has up to this point! Consider this your Gordon Ramsey treatment.

The massive space wasting image and complete lack of anything resembling content when first landing on a page isn't exactly blowing my skirt up. It's got that artsy trendy "content, what's that?!?" and "Accessibility, what's that" nonsense that just pisses off visitors to websites.

It's like 1990's style "splash pages" come home to roost as part of the page, with no indication there even is CONTENT unless you're lucky enough to notice there's a scrollbar. (which is great when modern mobile browsers hide that by default). On that count alone before I even dig into it, it's a miserable failure at web design... I'm not rocking 1920x1080 on my laptop or 2560x1440 on the desktop to load a web page where all there is is some goofy undersized impossible to read scripta as a logo, the menu, a five word heading and one meaningless marketspeak sentence visible... particularly with a massive bandwidth wasting background image utterly unrelated to anything.

... and that's before we talk the light grey over the image and red text on the menu being far below accessibility norms.

It was painful to watch the page load. The initial handshake to your server seemed to take way too long, and the "appear, scroll out, scroll back in" oddities in loading reeks of either broken CSS3 or pointless scripttardery. I suspect the latter given the network report is saying there's 5 scripts totalling 130k on a site I wouldn't even be wasting scripting on... though the 226k of CSS could equally to blame since an entire forum software or CMS has no excuse to need more than 48k of CSS apart from utter and complete developer ineptitude... and I'm saying that BEFORE I peek under the hood.

attempting accessibility navigation clearly shows a complete lack of understanding what numbered headings are or how to use them properly. Simply put the heading orders are gibberish, you've got headings on elements that are not the start of subsections, missing headings -- so on top of the "where's the beef" artsy fartsy design it fails to gracefully degrade either.

Gets worse when I scroll down and the laptop fan spins up to deal with the idiotic scriptttard post-load animated bullshit. The massive space wasting "where the hell's the contnet" rubbish so typical of "designer" bull is exactly the type if ignorant nonsense that is the core of my disgust with the industry as a whole right now... much less the moronic trend of stuffing multiple pages into one out of some sort of ignorant "pageloads are evil" paranoia that has no basis in fact and simply reduces usability!

You want to impress me? Make the page load faster. You want to REALLY impress me? Put the content where I can get at it and show it WHEN I scroll, NOT after some goofy scripttard scrolling hook and annoying animation that makes me blow past the content thinking it's a giant empty blank space!

Popping the bonnet to have a look at what's going on underneath, well... there's your problem. Bootcrap and jQueery. Seriously, go find a stick to scrape that ignorant scam artist BS off with before you go tracking it all over the Internet's carpets. The bloated rubbish markup that has resulted form the use of such ignorant trash is entirely inline with having been suckered into thinking that crap is somehow "easier" or "better" when to be brutally frank (when am I anything but?) it's just pissing all over your site from orbit... from the gibberish heading orders, massive scripting only garbage in the markup, lack of media targets on the stylesheets, multiple bloated stylesheets, DIV doing H1's job, H1 doing H2's job, ridiculously absurd number of presentational classes (a OOCSS/framework hallmark), clearing DIV and/or clearfix like it's still the 1990's, comment placements that could be tripping rendering bugs -- no joke, comments, those things browsers are supposed to ignore, can result in rendering bugs in IE and some versions of FF if you place them wrong -- span for nothing, <label> on non form text, scripttard onblur bullshit doing the same asshattery as abusing placeholder to do <label>'s job, paragraphs around non-grammatical paragraphs, static scripttardery in the markup...

It's even got the "copyright copyright" nonsense. The symbol means the same thing as the text, so use one or the other, not BOTH!

Even the non framework stuff is a mish-mash of gibberish. If you're going to use the 5 doctype, use the 5 header controls and not the HTML 3.2/4 style META like content-language or content-type. The title attribue exists not to keyword stuff but to be the window title, tab title or what's shown on the search engine, hence the rubbish of what you have NOT being all that useful... ... and seriously what is this hardon for vertical break characters in title tags I've been seeing for a decade and a half? Ignorance? Willfully trying to make it less useful?

You've got an overstuffed keywords meta with zero content relevance, remember it's keyWORDS. NOT keyphrases, NOT keysentences, but keyWORDS -- seven or eight SINGLE WORDS or proper names that exist between <body> and </body> as plaintext. See how you say "web" a dozen times? "design/designer" multiple times? Playing goofy word jumble games? Yeah, that's garbage likely to at minimum get your keywords ignored (hence why so many people CLAIM it doesn't do anything anymore out of ignorance on how to use it) or worse get you outright slapped down by search!

Hence the markup alone being 21k to deliver 4k of plaintext and maybe 7 actual images I'd treat as content (aka belonging in IMG tags), easily TWICE what should be used to deliver a page like that.

My advice, pitch that entire mess in the trash, and take the time to learn about HTML, CSS, and accessibility minimums before following all the other lemmings who sleaze out "designs" like this right off the edge of the cliff. You need to learn about semantic markup, separation of presentation from content, and that those "frameworks" you are relying on are simply making the pages harder to use, harder to maintain, and likely harder to build in the first place -- NO MATTER what wild bullshit claims the ignorant twits who promote them claim.

... and I said twits, I actually meant a harsher insult with a different vowel!

Again, sorry if that seems harsh, but this is just another cookie cutter poster-child for everything wrong with web development today.

 

Actually, I graduated 1st in my class, getting a degree in software engineering, with certificates in web development, Java development and Android application development. I maintained a 3.95 GPA and will be attending UW's school of computer science in the fall, which is ranked in the top 10 programs in the united states. I guess it's obvious that you don't like my website, that's ok. Building websites doesn't make money, selling them does. You know what sells? Big image, bouncy text websites that fade into view as you scroll.

 

Well, I've been programming for nearly four decades, since well before most schools even offered classes in such, and been doing websites for nearly two decades, so you'll have to excuse me if I'm rather unimpressed by your bragging about either having life paid for by mommy and daddy until your late twenties, or putting yourself or your family a decade or more into debt -- all for a meaningless piece of paper that means you managed to sit for two to eight years in front of "educators" who generally have knowledge sets a decade or more out of date, is based entirely on who's giving the college a kickback this year (these days that's Adobe, used to be Microshaft, and crApple before that), all whilst skipping over the most fundamental of basics like accessibility, user experience, graceful degradation, and logical document structure JUST to teach you the same "ooh shiny" scam that has led to the failure of person after person.

AT BEST they've deluded you into thinking they taught you anything worth knowing, at WORST they've trained you to be another brick in the wall.

Have they taught you separation of presentation from content? Accessibility guidelines like the WCAG? Usability studies like those by NNGroup? Content oriented design? Emissive colourspace? Do these terms even trigger any form of classical conditioning in you?

You know what also makes money? Selling SUCCESSFUL sites; aka sites that might actually be USEFUL to VISITORS. There's a reason you don't see these types of goofy "gee ain't it neat" asshattery on the major successful content driven websites; an when you do usually the site can't backpedal fast enough when they realize how many users it costs them. (see Paypal's perpetutual backpedal the past two years as they have to kick their design team in the nuts for that slow loading background video that makes most people deep-link into the site to avoid it!)

That's why you don't see this type of nonsense on Google, E-bay, Amazon, Youtube, Craigslist... Most of which if you shifted the colour hue 30% around the wheel and replaced the logo's with lookalikes, every one of the artsy fartsy "gee ain't it neat" fools would piss on them as horrible designs. Hell, most of them hold up Craigslist -- the PINNACLE of good accessible design -- as an example of what not to do; which should be enough to set off anyone's bullshit alarm right there!

Even when talking accessibility scripttard disasters like Facebook, Twitter or GooglePlus, they don't go there. Only place you find the type of garbage you have on that site are the template whorehouses filled with scam artists like themeForest or TemplateMonster; or the small businesses and startups who don't know enough about websites not to be duped by the flash over substance mentality.

Right up until you get fined in the UK, reputation destroyed by a lack of conversions and traffic... Oh yay, you impressed some "suit with a checkbook" and took them for a ride like a sleazeball scam artist. There's something to be proud of.

Again, sorry if that seems harsh, but suspecting there's ~16 years of age and ~38 years experience difference between us so we're not going to see things eye to eye. It would appear you've had a decade or more of smoke blown up your backside by career educators; sadly the delusional nonsense they packed you full of likely why you're looking at going back to being a "career student" since it's unlikely you'll last long in the workforce unless you can tongue enough brown to fail upwards... or are slick enough to just join the endless horde of sleazy scam artists that developers like myself get hired to go around and clean up after once this noodle-doodle nonsense falls apart leaving any client DUMB ENOUGH to fall for it with a complete failure on their hands. I'm in New England, but I've made a fair share of coin bailing out banks and government agencies in the UK facing usability fines -- fines that would certainly be imposed on a site built how you did if it were for a public utility, medical service, or government! Fines that ARE coming to other nations sooner than later! Be real fun when that hits the US and all these retarded bank websites start running around like chickens with their heads cut off!

SERIOUSLY, Did they teach you about the WCAG? Your font sizes and colour choices ALONE are saying you weren't. Your use of classes and being duped into using bootcrap says you weren't. It's painfully obvious they didn't teach you what a keywords META is or how to use it properly, how to style existing semantic elements BEFORE blindly slapping "DIV for nothing" around them... for someone tossing up a site about being a front-end developer it's painfully obvious you don't know what that MEANS.

Generally speaking if this is what you were taught, it's time to sue for your tuition money back; and I pity anyone you dupe into using you as a front end developer if this is typical of your results.

"required reading list"
https://www.w3.org/WAI/intro/wcag
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/ (yes, the ENTIRE articles section!)
http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/200704/lame_excuses_for_not_being_a_web_professional/

... and I'll toss a couple of my own in here too.
http://www.cutcodedown.com/article/whats_wrong_with_YOUR_website_index
http://www.cutcodedown.com/article/HTML_CSS_and_JS_frameworks

It's really more and more of a problem as this second Internet speculation bubble continues to grow; it's like everyone is either too young or too forgetful to remember the lessons of the last time around; where advertising and "flash over substance" thinking is what led to so many losing their shirts. But that's history for you, it's just sickening to see the same mistakes made every seven to fifteen years.

 

I saw your website, congratulations for putting it up! I am not a web developer but your website looks beautiful to my eyes.

 

Thank you!! I appreciate that!!

 

WOW!
Really nice and modern web design!
Great site!
I like your animation effects, your images, your overall web design.
Great work!

 

Your Website is looking very cool and responsive and color choice is nice, overall good.

 

Nice site, like it but the domain name is just beyond horrible. Get something better and shorter.