tempest

Hey,

This is my first attempt at actually designing a website, and i have to say it isn't very good work...
The code was pretty much hacked, since I haven't used my CSS skills in a while.

Give me some suggestions, feedback, etc...

http://70.153.55.211/be/

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bivhitscar

Whoa, what browser were you designing for? Because it's absolutely rooted in IE6 - works okay in firefox though in windows.
I think I'd need to see more layout designs before saying much more. But one thing that stands out is the menus aren't contrasting well with the background - they're too hard to see. If you can fix the IE issues you'll be on track for an okay site though. And forget about trying to get it right for macs as well

You should also be checking your code with w3c - HTML & CSS

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Indigno

The images at the top are simply horrible. Nothing screams out "New at web design" (even though you may not be) like several pictures in a row that do not blend together.

tempest

lol, well i am new as a web designer, i just didn't know a better way to approach the problem given that i couldn't find a decent enough source image to find the dimensions without being blurry, and i was on GIMP so i didn't have the best editing tools at my disposal.

Thanks for the tips bivhitscar, i've got it to tell me i have valid xHTML strict but i think i'm going to fix most of the CSS effects compatibilty problems by just taking the result, and saving it. As for the bottons, i'm still not sure how i'm going to bring a good navigation menu into the design. I guess i'll finish the site when i get home from school...

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Infinite Recursion

it looks ok... but the menu "buttons" will be hard to read for some people... and people who use IE, can't see them at all (as mentioned previously).

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http://jasonpowers.net

"There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root."

DaWei

IE often disagrees with other browsers about what constitutes a "parent" element unless you make it abundantly clear. I'd recommend an enclosing div for the entire page. I find it helpful to add a border style with loud colors that stand out when I'm laying out a page. They can be removed at any point by setting their width to zero. I'd also look for an image that covers the width of the page, with or without stretching. Because it's a background, detail isn't as important. One can compress the bejaysus out of it so that it loads as rapidly as possible. Whether or not you defer presentation of the rest of the page until the image loads is a matter of personal and circumstantial choice.

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Lich

I Second DaWei's idea of putting it all in 1 big div, many designers use a wrapper div to keep things explicit and makes it easier to define child elements (simply put, it'll save you a lot of trouble).

As for the image at the top, it's hard to see, so it makes you focus (it looks like i've run my mouse over it and selected it). Then once you focus you see it's actually a bunch of images. Not good. If there's 1 area of my computing experience where I feel that open source will never win over commercial software it's in the graphic design arena. If you're going to use a bunch of images like that, it's fine. But you need to blend them together so it flows (even just a minimal fade like what I did @ http://ac-prods.com/ can work wonders for how people view the site).

The overall look of the design is good for a first one, but you need to spruce things up a bit before you go live with it.

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