My new website

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Permalink Reply by Dave Cooper on March 15, 2011 at 22:33

Great looking site!   I love the way it looks.  There are a few problems for me: the navigation is really tough to read!  I don't know what screen you designed this on, but I suspect HUGE!  I'm viewing it on a 15" monitor and the text is just too small and too low contrast.  The contrast bit is probably due to defective colour vision (text looks grey to me, but I suspect it may be some kind of red!).  Pumping up the text size (ctrl +) gets it legible but takes the right hand item off the screen.  Consider how it would work on an iphone ;-) .

I can't say I'd particularly recommend XHTML 1.0 strict  for your markup - the few times I've tried it, I always get a very stiff looking result by the time I've got it to validate.  Submitting your index page to the W3C validator shows 9 errors and 78 warnings.  I'd suggest XHTML 1.0 loose if you want to use XHTML, but I mostly use HTML5 these days - I believe it's the future, particularly as the new IE9 release has pretty good support for it.  

The way you've use css to position the page items is a bit clunky:  if you use percentages or a table 100% wide you can have the items position themselves across the screen irrespective of the screen size / resolution. It's my preferred technique.  Although it does mean you lose a bit of control, I think that it works acceptably across the whole range of screen sizes instead of looking great on some sizes and not so great on others.  I know it's quite difficult for graphic artists to relinquish control like this:  they are used to paper publishing and assume that publishing on the web is just the same.

Finally, congratulations on writing your html and css from scratch.  On the web you see so many sites that have been cranked out using frontpage or dreamweaver or something and they're fine but they do they do tend to look a tad samey.  Hand-crafted sites are a bit of fresh air!  

Hope this all helps.  Dave Cooper

Permalink Reply by owain on March 31, 2011 at 16:14

Hi Dave,

 

Thanks a lot for taking the time to look at my website! Really appreciate it. Its difficult to be objective when you have been staring at it for a long time! Ive taken on board what you say about the XHTML strict and have changed it to loose, I learned how to build web sites from a book so have limited knowledge!

 

I would like to use the 'percentage' method in order for the site to fill any size screen but that is beyond my skills at the moment..(still learning!) so maybe the next incarnation can incorporate this.

 

The point about the navigation was very useful as obviously this is rather important! I have since decided to change the scrap book style background to a more professional looking one anyway and in doing so altered the link colour and size so hopefully it is a bit more readable!

 

Thanks again,

 

Owain

Permalink Reply by Chris Davis on June 24, 2011 at 13:24

Hi Owain, 

 

I realise I'm very late replying to this, but I've just this second taken a look at your website and just wanted to congratulate you on the way it looks!  

 

There are really only two suggestions I can make in terms of improvements: 

 

At the moment the content of your website displays left-aligned in my browser - I don't mean that everything I'm seeing in terms of your design is aligned hard left, but that the content area of your website itself is aligned to the left side of the screen.  I personally think this would look better if this area were centered.  The way I always achieve this is by adding a "text-align: center" property to the body tag in the CSS, although there may be a more professional way of doing it!  :)

 

(Doing this does mean, of course, that if you would like your text and other elements to display left-aligned, you will need to add a "text-align: left" property to the div that contains all your content.)  

 

Also just to add that I'm using Safari on Mac OS X, so it's possible that the content of your site does display centrally-aligned on other browsers!  :)

 

The other suggestion I would make is that I notice from your code that you don't have any "meta-data" in the head of your website.  By meta-data I mean that your website doesn't include any information such as a description and / or "tags" that would allow your site to be picked up by Google and other search engines.  I believe this is very important for website promotion, so that, for example, if somebody doesn't know your website address but has heard about your work, they can easily find you by typing "Owain George artist" into their favourite search engine.   

 

If you're hand-coding it should be pretty easy to add these elements to your website.  I'd also like to add my congratulations to you for taking the difficult but ultimately more rewarding route of learning how to hand-code your site rather than relying on web design software to create it.  I've seen some awesome-looking sites that have been designed via a WYSIWYG interface, but I strongly believe that for optimum website results, hand-coding is the way to go.  I also think you have come up with a lovely design that is beautiful in its simplicity.  

 

I hope my comments and suggestions have been helpful, and congratulations again on the excellent design of your website.  

 

Best wishes,

 

Chris