New site under construction - styling comments received gratefully!

[dotnetmachine]

Hello,

this is my first personal web site so I would welcome any comments on the styling. Normally I would get in third-party designers for the graphical templates for customers because I am a rubbish artist!

Cheers

[dotnetmachine]

Should have mentioned that the home page has no content so you would need to check out pages in the "Other Information" section.

[dotnetmachine]

I have uploaded some info now and got the home page going.

Any comments?

[Tim Marshall]

Not a bad design at all for someone who doesn't do design!!!
Looking promising, will have a peek back here and there to see how you're getting on.

Least you've done more on your site than i have; i've always got too much to do for other people so never get the chance to get my site finished. By the time the chance comes round i hate the design thats there and start again!

BTW, i agree about the exception handling, an article may be a good idea as error pages in .net mean nothing to most people!!!

Keep up the good work

Tim Marshall

[dotnetmachine]

Thanks for the feedback.

Even though the design is pretty simple I am actually quite pleased with it. It was about my fourth attempt and, as I am no designer, the one that stuck for me.

I will at some point redevelop the site as a project on the site. However, before that I am going to develop a few Windows apps. Hopefully I can get people to support the site by shelling out a couple of quid for them!

[sasfreak]

looking good so far... just very green. The main text seems to be blending in with the design of the page and thus is a little taxing on the eyes.

Smiler

[James H]

Good start :P

You need to find a darker colour for the links because you can hardly read them against the light background! Furthermore you could do with another colour in your colour scheme thats not green to make it a little easier on the eye!

Remember that search engines/screen readers will ignore images, so if you have any text as an image, it shouldn't be anything mention anything vital.

Finally I think the header is a little too big (high).

[dotnetmachine]

Yeah, I am pretty bad with colours (and design in general!)

I tried to introduce a bit of red and use red links that stand out more to me but it all just looked a bir garish.

Any suggestions?

Cheers

[dotnetmachine]

Hmm. Playing with a touch of orange - seems ok. Do green and orange go well together to people with design ability?

[dotnetmachine]

Hehe.

Not a massive difference but it should stop the content and the header blending together and hopefully the slightly revised link colour is better too. Will review it again later but I have an article I want to get finished.

Getting annoyed by the CSS styles though. When I change the .menuitem style it does not seem to be working properly and I can't work out why. For example, if I change .menuitem to size 12pt, the menu items at the left and in the boxes at the foot of the home page change size as expected. When I change the text colour though, the menu down the left changes as expected but the boxes at the bottom stay exactly the same.

Can anyone help me on that one?

[Waldovia PM]

I think the green was OK, I just thought you were selling first aid kits

[dotnetmachine]

LOL

Now they are first aid kits that some kid has spilled orange cordial on!

[Marc]

Great job, I really like it. How about a bit of padding on the right of the body text though?

[dotnetmachine]

I know I should be writing more articles but for some reason I am working on the web design again. Want a bit more colour in it. Looking at getting it up in the next few days with a bit of a change and probably a three column layout rather than two.

[dotnetmachine]

...and a few pixels padding on the right hand side. Generally better use of CSS in there I think though still a table or two around to get things perfectly aligned

Will be trying to finish it off tomorrow.