Please review my freelance site

I've recently gone freelance full time and my website is one of my two main sources of advertising/leads (the other being word of mouth).

http://www.pwaring.com

It's using Bootstrap as I'm not a great designer. I'm mainly looking for feedback on the content and how I can lay things out to sell myself - particularly on the front page.

Thanks!

 

Your light greys on white are below accessibility minimums, PICK a bloody font size, your use of px metric fonts are also below accessibility minimums... basically, read the WCAG.

As to bootcrap -- why? Seriously, just looking to track it all over the carpets? Your site isn't complex enough for responsive to be more than a dozen lines after the main desktop style. It has saddled you with endless pointless DIV for nothing, gibberish presentational use of classes, and a whole host of other "how not to build a website" issues -- scary in what is so simple a site.

That said, simple is good... but seriously at LEAST familiarize yourself with accessibility norms.

Though it always terrifies me how someone listing themselves as doing stuff in a bloody hypertext preprocessor can be so unaware of how to write hypertext properly. Doesnae make much sense, but nonetheless seems a common affliction. I mean no media targets on the stylesheet LINK, gibberish use of numbered headings, attributes like TARGET that have no business in any HTML written after 1997, etc, etc... Just how exactly are you qualified to do anything in PHP if you aren't qualified to create what it's meant to output?!?

You might want to focus on content more and make less separate pages too. It's all very... lacking in content. Like your contact info? Get that on the front huffing page instead of separate. (might make a good column to help fill things out). Even better rather than making yourself a spam magnet by putting your e-mail addy up there -- you do back end dev in php? You should at LEAST know how to make a contact form!

You also might want to use abbr when you say "CV" since nobody outside the UK (and many people inside it) are going to have a clue what a "Curriculum Vitae" is. Most people just call it a resume.

Basically setting aside the front-end development woes, you've got too little content spread out over too many pages. Given content is the most important thing that's what I'd be addressing first.

 

Fair point, I've changed the theme now so that it has more contrast.

I use Bootstrap because it makes it easy to roll out a site without having to worry about making my CSS work on every device and browser combination. I don't want to go back to the bad old days of having to write endless CSS just get a two column fluid layout working.

Fair point, I'll fix that and also ask the Bootstrap developers about it (most of the HTML is taken from their template).

target is a valid attribute in HTML 5, and in fact it's never been invalid, though it was deprecated for a while.

I'm re-ordering the content into fewer categories at the moment, I agree the pages are a bit sparse at the moment.

An email link makes it easy for people to use whatever client they are happy with, and also keep a copy of the mail in their sent folder (which a contact form does not). SpamAssassin stops the vast bulk of incoming junk email - I get perhaps a dozen spam messages a day at most.

I'm a UK freelancer looking to work with UK clients, so CV is the appropriate term to use. Résumé isn't used much in the UK and confuses people as it looks like 'resume' (i.e. to carry on doing something).

 

"Easy"?



I just don't get how people consider something else to learn, that makes you write more HTML using PRESENTATIONAL classes and basically pissing all over the place is "easier". Particularly when you then have to add your own CSS on top of their ridiculous bloated halfwit BS to even get it to work how you want. It's idiotic halfwit ineptly coded rubbish that I find unfathomable how anyone who knows the first blasted thing about HTML or CSS would use by choice.

Asking them why their code is bloated halfwit nonsense? Waste of time. The folks who come up with idiotic nonsense like bootcrap, turdpress, blueprint, jquery, etc, etc wouldn't know accessibility or good practices if it stripped naked, painted itself purple and hopped up on a table to sing "Oh look at how gracefully I degrade!"

Admittedly, I say the same thing about HTML 5 and it's mouth-breathing dumbass reintroduction of redundancies and accessibility issues that 4 STRICT was trying to get rid of -- but that's what happens when you have documentation of what people are doing masquerading as a specification; specifications should be authoritative telling people what they SHOULD be doing, not what everyone just happens to be doing and who gives a shit if it's useful to users. Whenever people call HTML 5 "modern" or "the future" I go "really, looks like the bleeding edge of 1997 development practices to me!"

Gimme a couple minutes to get breakfast in me and I'll belt out a quick rewrite of your homepage just to show what I mean in terms of bootstrap+jquery idiocy vs. not bothering with that crap. If it takes me more than 5k of css for that home page and 3k of markup, I'll be SHOCKED. Hell for scripting I'd be surprised if it takes me more than 400 bytes (not counting comments)!

 

Here's that quick rewrite. Didnae take long since it's such an easy page.

http://www.cutcodedown.com/for_others/pWaring/template.html

As with all my examples the directory:

http://www.cutcodedown.com/for_others/pWaring/

Is wide open for easy access to the gooey bits and pieces. 3 files, 8k total vs. the ridiculous 257k in 7 files you had. (that 251k of that was the CSS and scripting?)

If your ENTIRE site in it's current state takes more than around 12k of CSS, you are doing something horrifyingly and terrifyingly WRONG. Same with the scripting since I don't see anything that needs more than 400 bytes of scripting.

My rewrite isn't a perfect 1:1 as I didn't do the "let's blow up the home page text so massive nothing fits on a handheld" nonsense, and I handle the menu differently leveraging :target to do the heavy lifting instead of that stupid malfing scripttardery hamburger icon crap that doesn't even WORK on half the mobile devices out there...

The use of :target is cute as the only thing I have the scripting doing is trapping the anchor, preventing event propagation and using document.location.replace so opening/closing the menu doesn't fill up the history. Scripting off IT STILL WORKS, just the history fills up. Graceful degradation is important since a LOT of people disable scripting on their small screen devices so fat bloated bullshit like jquery doesn't suck on their battery life like a vampire who's spent the last millennia in torpor.

Almost half the markup to boot since I got rid of all the bootcrap nonsense. If you are saying what things are going to look like in your markup -- EVEN by the use of classes, then your markup is rubbish! Yes, that means that blueprint, bootstrap, YUI and every other CSS framework out there is rubbish!

Layout and fonts are all dynamic, so it's elastic and auto-sizes for users like myself instead of that fixed pixel garbage that sends me diving for the zoom. It's also semi-fluid with a max-width to prevent long lines from being hard to read, and finally it gets a couple dozen lines of responsive. Page is so simple there's more code to make the menu responsive than there is for the rest of the page's reflow... though the semi-fluid elastic design helps greatly in making responsive layout a no-brainer.

With the massive code bloat, requirement of writing more markup AND more CSS, reliance on massive scripttardery for the simplest of functionality, I really stand here confused wondering just what's in the kool-aid of people who call things like bootcrap or jquery "easier". It's like todays developers are kicking back too hard on the leen.

Well on top of the now accepted practice of flipping the double bird at accessibility -- which is fun since in the UK you can be fined for that depending on the nature of the site.