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my first client


grabenair

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I just finished with my first client, who is very happy with her site. But I would like some opinion good or bad, I take criticism well. I feel that it is ok for a beginner. But of coarse I built it lol. I just feel like I could use some input from fellow designers. I have only been doing this about 18 months. I took two classes, but I learned more from this site and linda.com. Also from a friend that has been doing this for over 10 years. The site is http://www.roxanesmarine.com I have a long way to go I know, but I am hopping by mid summer I can find a job somewhere as a intern. Thank you

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I just finished with my first client, who is very happy with her site. But I would like some opinion good or bad, I take criticism well. I feel that it is ok for a beginner. But of coarse I built it lol. I just feel like I could use some input from fellow designers. I have only been doing this about 18 months. I took two classes, but I learned more from this site and linda.com. Also from a friend that has been doing this for over 10 years. The site is http://www.roxanesmarine.com I have a long way to go I know, but I am hopping by mid summer I can find a job somewhere as a intern. Thank you

 

 

Hello,

 

Congratulations on your first client.

 

I am not a designer so I will leave it for others to give input on that; however, the bottom left image with text: "Motors for Sale" is half way under where I think it is supposed to end. What I mean is that it is half way on the white background with the rest of content and half way on the background of water drops.

 

I am using IE8.

 

Was there a reason you didn't put the css in a separate file?

 

Congratulations again, as with anything, I imagine the first one is the most difficult to get out the way.

Edited by joecool
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Site is good for a first proper site. I would second joecool and start creating external style sheets. Will save you having to have the same chunk of code on each page.

 

I'm no designer, but the site does have a kind of 80s/early 90s feel to it. Don't take this the wrong way, it's a lot better than the first site i ever did! For a more extensive use of fonts i'd advise using google fonts api. There are lots you can use for free and means you can have better looking fonts without having to use images.

 

Keep it up though. What i found good was making site and after site in my free time for fictious companies or just for areas that interest you and try to do totally different styles on each one. I found this helped me greatly expand my skills and also gives you a bit portfolio to show prospective employers. If you haven't already get yourself a domain to play around with and try things out.

 

Look at templates as well. When starting off i used to look at free templates (plenty out there) to see how they were put together and adapt them. When i got confident with that i started making my own. I still look around at templates though, it never hurts to get inspiration.

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Thanks for the info joecool I will go see if I can fix it.

Thanks for the advice pb1uk. The look of 80s/early 90s feel is kinda what I was looking in for from advice. I keep looking at the site trying to figer out what was missing I think you hit it. I do play with fictious sites for practice. I am also building a web reference site, not that I am all that good but it gives me another site to show clients and a place to go find stuff I forgot how to do. The site is http://www.freewebdesigningreference.com and thank you again

Edited by grabenair
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The website is great for a first, definatly!

 

I have only created templates so far, so your already steps above me...

 

The only suggestion i would make is very minor, but a suggestion all the same. The sidebar at the left has images which contain the same link as the descriptive text - and i personally think it would look better if they were contained within the same link tag so that if you hover over the image, the link changes color anyway.

 

It just shows viewers that both links take you to the same place, and it looks quite professional too :)

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so yeah it's good work. it looks well enough. in my opinion most of the problems are in the backend. I only looked at the first page (index) but I made as many notes as I could. I tried to be as clear as possible because I'm not sure how much knowledge you have in this but I just basically reorganized that index page wrote down the changes I made and why and you should be able to apply it to the rest of the site.

 

There were three types of changes basically some were errors or erroneous code. Like for instance you had a CSS ID defined that you never used. Some where personal opinion like I think it would be better to have all your images in one folder rather than three. Some might have been decisions I couldn't understand for instance maybe you needed to have the height defined in the navigation but I was able to give decent similar spacing without it.

 

There is a problem with the bottom logo image showing below the white of the background but I'm pretty sure that has to do with the floating you're doing. I wasn't able to figure it out in the time I spent on this but you shouldn't need that many floating elements. Once you fix that the background should meet the bottom of the image.

 

So in the file I'm uploading you want to look at the image b/c it shows you the logo extension issue I just mentioned. read the CHANGELOG and the CSS file. Both of those have notes on the changes I made, why I made them and what they do.

 

Based on what I saw in your site code here are a few places I'd recommend if you haven't already bookmarked them

http://www.w3schools.com/css/css_intro.asp

http://960.gs/

 

I don't know what sort of editor you used but I'm assuming based on your spacing it was a basic text editor. Especially for reading the files I'm attaching, may I suggest something more advanced like N++ (http://portableapps.com/apps/development/notepadpp_portable) You're going to want the syntax highlighting or it's just going to look like a wall of text with my comments.

sitenotes.zip

 

Congratulations again.

Edited by wolfkin
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I agree with the comments re the external stylesheet and the 80s look/feel - especially the background looks so much like canned 'comes-with-the-program' kind of stuff and doesn't really go with the water in the header.

 

Also - and forgive me if I repeat what was already said, I wasn't taking notes.

 

First - and that's not webdesign, that's spelling - look at the links in your sidebar - some are all caps, some are just caps in the first word - it's a mix. Whatever you chose, be consistent, but capping the nouns and lower-casing the word 'for' would probably be best. And "In" in North Iowa's Number One... should be all lower case as well.

 

Some space to the left of the boat pic (first paragraph) would be better - like the right space on the pic of that woman a couple paragraphs further down.

 

The page seems to be missing a footer - granted, there's no law that says you must have one, but at least some contact info and the copyright stuff kind of finishes the page optically.

 

Then I validate your code - only 2 errors, that's good - but you can fix those. An ID is meant to me used only ONE time on a page - if you need to use something more than once, use 'class'.

 

Always better to use a strict doctype - the cleaner the code the better - and there's no need for you to use XHTML, HTML would be just fine and the right choice.

 

The links are actually a list and should be coded as such - http://www.csstutorial.net/2010/02/how-to-style-a-horizontal-navigation-menu-with-css/

 

align="center" is deprecated, Instead use your CSS an write:

h1 {
text-align: center;
}

(same for the p)

 

For the CSS (when you move it into an external stylesheet - use shortcuts - less messy coding: http://www.csstutorial.net/2010/02/css-shortcuts/

 

And I didn't look at any pages but index, either.

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