Advice Wanted on my Website

Leman_Russ

Well, I am making a big step into the world of Webmastering, and now I am stuck making and maintaining a site for nothing! :mad:

Nah, is for a friend, but I'd like some feedback on the layout and such.

Here is my site

Also, does anyone know where I can host a phpBB forum for free?

NeVeR

none of the image in the gallery work.

I think the Red link text at the bottom is a little hard to read,

dangerman

Leman_Russ, well done on your first step into the world of webmastering.

The best advice I can give you is to look at other sites with a similar purpose to yours and emulate their ideas and designs.

At the moment, your site looks a bit simplistic and a bit dated. If your goal is to attract potential orders then a more professional look + feel would go along way. I would consider dropping the tacky tiled background and working a bit more to make the rollovers on the left handside more professional looking.

The actual large pics of the little painted miniatures are cool - why not include one or two pics of those on the main page of the site so people know what the site is about straight away?

Best advice is to keep plugging away at it.

Good luck!

pork99

The background is a bit headwrecking for my tastes

Apart from that I'd advise you to learn anything you can about Cascading Style Sheets - this will allow you to do away with font tags and blank gifs for positioning (so 1997 ) and generally make designing and maintaining your site a lot easier.

For a start this tutorial is very accessible for beginners

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

A bit more advanced

http://www.thenoodleincident.com/tutorials/css/

mjquinno

just a thought :

have a look at this site its got some good ideas and concepts if your looking for insperation...


www.favouritewebsiteawards.com/

Leman_Russ

Thank you all for your help.

I guess that backround is a bit sad, and I see I need to learn CSS.

PiE

You don't need to learn CSS for a small site like that, though you should if you want to do anything more serious.

For a simple website for a friend, like this one, basic HTML will do as long as you do it properly. As has been said already, look at similiar websites for an idea of what it should look like. As it stands, that website is very unlikely to sell anything or help increase the guys rep.

chakotha

Not too shabby for a first site at all

Your mate and yourself should come up with a logo of some sort as it will instantly brand each page in the site and a smaller font size would lend to a more professional look - its huge. And maybe a bit more cellpadding in the main page content cell if you stick with tables as the text hugs the sides a bit (Or a 1 cell table within that cell with higher cellpadding). And something to augment the sense of layout without making it looking too rectangular. The left nav and header are just kind of floating there.
All the best!

newgrange

There are a few spelling and grammatical errors you need to fix. I hope you are not offended by my pointing these out.

To order anything from us, WHETHER it is a miniature...
This will be when they are MOULDED to the rest of the miniature...
This would be things like combining the upper and lower TORSOS...
Buy 2 banner-CARRYING MINIATURES from us...
THAT'S even Better VALUE...

You have some odd instances of capital letters in the middle of sentences, which you might want to change too.

Leman_Russ

Oh, yes. I haddent seen those.

Well, that's what feedback is for!

I've also started working on a propper banner and buttons, added a propper backround, and am gonna re-vamp the gallery ASAP.

Thanks again for all your help!

Update: I got a propper Gallery working now, though I havent added the descriptons of each model yet, and there are only 4 pics, but it is still an improvement.

Leman_Russ

oh my god my spelling is real CRAP

and don't bother to look the site is down

rsynnott

PiE wrote:

For a simple website for a friend, like this one, basic HTML will do as long as you do it properly..

Blashphemy!