First design in about 10 years - should I have bothered!?

[neilfahey]

http://home.iprimus.com.au/jediwdog/stephens.htm

It's going to be at www.stephensboats.com when it's finished but I just thought I'd see if anyone had some constructive comments/criticism for me? Any help would be appreciated!
Thanks
Neil

 

[neilfahey]

Hrmm well we're gonna have to do something with it 'cos they've stuffed us up now as I said before...

How did you know it was MelbourneIT? Are you asking me to call you so you can host it for me? I'm not actually organising the hosting so it'd be no good me calling you...
Neil

 

[bafoon]

im using firefox

edit: it works now, i wouldnt say its good, but first time in 10 years aint terrible i guess

 

[neilfahey]

Thanks bafoon...

 

[bhyraj]

loadedsite. Ican't view correctly.

 

[RegFee]

You should cosider using Lorem Ipsum for dummy text instead of putting "... Blah blah blah blah blah blah blablahblah blahblablah blah blah etcetera..."

Link: www.lipsum.com

wow, great link.
Thanks!

Re: the site...
It loaded a little slow for me, and I'm on a cable connection. How big are those graphics?

 

[neilfahey]

bhyraj: what browser are you using? What did it come up looking like?

azt: Only about 52kb...

Can anyone tell me a good total image size guideline for pages?

 

[LeetPCUser]

It needs a lot of work. First off the header needs something catchy. Maybe if you got someone on here to design one and incorporate a boat or something into the logo. The buttons could also use some work and I would suggest not having all the pictures on the left, as it takes away from your content area. I would also recommend bordering off your content. If you know how to use CSS you can check out this link for centering and boxing in the content.

Hope This Helps,

 

[mappaiyo]

please don't blame yourself, i might be worse than you're, and i can't say something bad there, i think your page needs huge redesign

 

[ammo]

ITs okay for your first in 10 years, but lots of room for improvement, dont let me or theese people discourage you though

 

[Sparky]

It shows that you havn't done anything for 10 years to be honest. The reason you're running into the problems you are and have to start from scratch is the fact you're using tables for layout. If you used divs and css then you wouldn't be facing them.

As already said a better banner would look nice. It's not great, but it's not terrible either. Just work on it and you'll get there.

 

[neilfahey]

Thanks for your honesty guys! It's good to see what needs improving for next time we design a site or for when we do version 2 of this one. The client wants something up ASAP so we're not gonna change much on this one. We'll do a complete redesign once this one is up. Apparently at the moment they keep getting calls saying "Where's your website?" because they put the domain name on their brochures about 6 months ago...

computergeek: If you dont like that logo, you should see what they've got us using now! They aren't flexible on the logo design at all...

sparky: Can you point me to a tutorial on layout with CSS? Ten years ago I was pretty damn sure tables was the best way!

Thanks again guys,
Neil

 

[Sparky]

Heh, no worries. 10 years is a long time.

http://htmldog.com/

It will take a while to get used to seperating your page into divs and styling/positioning them with css but it is well worth it. Look at some of the stuff that can be acheived:

http://csszengarden.com/

Good luck.

 

[Coastalguy]

I like it!
Like the font.
Like the images.

ST

 

[neilfahey]

Thanks CoastalGuy! Glad someone likes it

Sparky: I just had a quick look at that zengarden site and it looks awesome! I think you've sold me there for sure!!! I better do some work now - been here for an hour and a half and all I've done is read about web design stuff (I don't work as a web designer by the way)