It's not fully functional, but I wanted to see if you guys could give me some pointers for my site: www.mustang-accessories.info I've been playing with the design for a total of 6-8hrs now, and this is the first site I've designed. Work on layout as well as the banner at the top, color scheme, etc. is all I've been doing. Got a sample page up at the site, no functional links as of yet. If you'd look at it and tell me if you think it's worth a damn and pointers to make it look proffessional & polished, I'd be grateful. Thanks Johnny
Not very nice. Sorry. The text on top of graphics needs to be much easier to see/read. The grey background on the banner is boring, and the bullet points don't make sense for the menu system. Have you considered Wordpress? It's especially great for people who aren't designers.
yeah, that's what I expected... I don't like wordpress, I don't want to make a blog. I knew color selection would be something that I need to focus on, but you know how it is when you get in to something creative: you have to get outside opinions & step back before you really start to see everything as clearly as you should... I know about the bullets, but at this point I'm just happy that I coded a page that has a layout that's somewhat normal & I've been trying to get products on the page all day. It's day two so I'm not totally discouraged that I know nothing about web design, but on the design side I know I'm going to have a lot of ground to cover. Any resources on the web about design that you might recommend? Thanks for replying, even thought he site is horrible. Johnny p.s. check out some of the other auto websites, just search car accessories in google, and let me know how you think I stack up?
Wordpress isn't just a blog tool anymore. Its like the easiest basic CMS solution out there. Lots of "professional" sites use Wordpress, and google loves it. Designing a nice HTML/CSS website from scratch is really, really hard unless you have been doing it for a few years and have a real flare for design.
I would suggest getting rid of the grey background on the banner and just making it transparent. You can keep that other shade at the back. Have a nice grunty yellow mustang on the other side from the title image with also a transparent back, that should balance it out. Then the content below the title, is that navigation bar as you have, under which are two columns. Small left side column, rather than the bullets, red with black text like the navigation at top. Create a footer for the site as well, also red, and add some text info about the site there (google also loves that SEO). So basically the red is flowing around the side from top, left, bottom. Black border the top navigation, side navigation and content, and footer as one piece. Keeping the title and car image floating outside. Draw it down on some rough paper, then work out the div positions, etc. (sry i cant draw them for you) I recommend you get rid of the 'Under Construction' sign and your not found links ASAP, if google can finds the site it will hate them even if you aren't finished. Meaning longer wait for later when it is up and going...
Well, you are going to construct a very good website no doubt so keep it up and try to make the relevancy between the content and the design so that anyone can get a clear idea your website by just looking at the design of your website...
You may want to take a look around for free site layouts to give you a starting point. There are good free Wordpress ones, if you decide to go that way, or other plain HTML layouts at sites like Open Source Web Design (oswd.org)
I don't like the color combination, I'm not an expert but gray and red don't work very well in my opinion.