My first website Design

Please critique the layout I designed for a new website I am working on. Thanks.

/DJ

 

Looks very smart, techy, sharp, layout is very organised.

Just thinking, would the search box be better placed to the right of the "links" button at the top?

I'm intrigued to see how the purchase/contact/lawsuit boxes on the right will work and the "spotlight" on the bottom left...

 

Thanks. I appreciate the feedback and ideas. I will keep you posted. Now the fun part of coding the CSS. I am pretty certain I can achieve this look without a single table and very little code.

Thanks again,

/DJ

 

Best of luck - looking forward to see the next instalment

 

thats really nice.... what kind of page file size are you expecting?
why without any tables?

 

Wow, very clean and organised!

 

Stunningly clean and professional-looking, considering its your "first" website design.

One note... It looks a little template-ish to me. By this I mean it looks very much like alot of those $65 templates you can get - all look sorta techy/shiny/futuristic in nature. I don't think I can describe it any better than that, but I see so many of those darn templates I tend to dislike designs that resemble them.

Overall nice work.

 

It looks simple and thats good. I like the combination of yellow gold and light gray. Good Work!

 

Nothing wrong with templates

Real nice design!! Great work!

 

Gem, no tables = nice friendly code for the SE' bots and spiders, downloads quicker.

I'm doing the same with my site (when I have the time!) it'll all built on CSS.

Nice design!

 

surely 5 nested tables or something like that will not exactly chew up the download time?
seems like really extreme design...and hardly worth the effort
I 'm sure I'm wrong
G-E-M

 

GEM, suppose it depends how much you want to have your site HTML, CSS validated.

 

> I am pretty certain I can achieve this look without a single table and very little code.

Various browsers display DIV-based HTML/CSS in their own way. See my post in the thread 5798 for an example.

As I mentioned, there's nothing wrong with tables. Search engines will walk tables just as well as any other HTML - try searching anything on Google and see if the first results use tables or not.

From the CSS2 point of view, tables help a lot. For example, you can use <tbody> or <colgroup> to minimize the number of column-specific CSS classes.

J.D.

 

Looks nice.. Just tell me this though. Are you really gonna have flash on the front page? Or anywhere for that matter? Flash is one of my pet peaves, kinda like the over done "blinking" HTML that was soooo popular in 95'.

Flash is great for demos, tours, and other things, but on the home page? Drives me bonkers.. Other than that looks sharp.

 

You prolly want to place the search box in the upper right. If your site is for people looking for lawyer services for car crashes - news might not be to important to them. A flash intro might be uneeded as well. Maybe moving the "I want too.." part in place of it.

 

I agree! About 10 minutes ago i landed at a website that took over 20 seconds to load some pointless flashings and i didnt even finish watching it load. If I wanted to watch a graphic show, I would check out some of my winamp plugins

 

Again, that is why it is such a pet peave of mine. Imagine your web site as an actual store or place of business if you will. How many times have you gone to the grocery store to be bombarded by those bank tellers handing out memberships to their in store bank, when all you need to get is some milk for your kid? Or imagine a clown outside your front door making customers watch some stupid trick before they can get in. Or a preacher outside the local liquor store touting the evils of booze when all you wanted was to walk in, buy a lottery ticket and leave. Its annoying.

Again, flash is great for demos, product examples, support tutorials, etc. But when it comes to your main page of your business, think of it as an actual door to your business, your front door. You want your customers to come in, not have to wait on line, or jump through hoops.

What's worse are ISP's (with flash on their home page) that customers have as their home page, or typically go to all the time, ie., on a regular basis. Who wants to see the flash over and over and over and over again!

 

True, nothing is wrong with tables. BUT, using CSS for all your formatting and most design effects typically results in a site having less total HTML code for the spiders to crawl through. This does have a benefit on rankings, in that it will get your keyword-rich content closer to the top of your source code. I'll be the first to admit that this effect is probably minimal on overall rankings, but does exist.

Probably not worth redesigning a current site, but certainly worth the thought if one is looking to design a new site. I believe this is one of the reasons blogs do so well - most rely heavily on CSS for style, positioning and formatting and less so on tons of HTML code. Of course the fresh content and linking plays the biggest advocate for blogs - but CSS-based design does have its advantages.

 

It's a great design and i like it.. But Still 1 suggestion, Try and seee by not making the Sentences in Bold on "I want to......) Section..

 

Very nice, esspecially since it's your first one. My first website design sucked.
Though I also suggest the search box being in the top right, and I suggest that you don't use flash because you don't need it. Just put a professional image in that space or something.