3 Times the Charm!

Firstly... Good job on using CSS, however using that framebased forwarding service from the dot tk registry is going to blow your chances with the search engiens. Get a proper hosting account.

Secondly, use a proper font (arial, verdana) for the footer. Impact looks messy when rendered in html. You havent used it anywhere else so why use it here? Consistancy is very important.

Thirdly... use some images to convey style, ideas, concepts. Plain text can be very dull.

Lastly... why have you bothered to use font tags AND css? it kinda defeats the point of css... loose the font tags!

This looks better, anyway. one thing I noticed right away was a lot of variation in font sizes and styles. More consistency would be good. Do you not have a good graphics program? That logo looks terrible.

To be blunt, what you need to realize is that good web design skills can't be acquired overnight. You need to take time. It will take many site designs and a lot of work before you become reasonably proficient. My advice is to try with a hobby site or personal site before you attempt to go into business. Personal sites are a great place to experiment and learn the basic tools of the trade.

This is my sort of personal site. I couldn't think of any other subject matter that interested me enough to really work at making a site look good, so this is my subject. I haven't shown this to any customers (not that I have any, considering I haven't pursued any). This is my way of learning and experimenting.

Do what I did... setup a blog. (mine's at greendezire.com).

It's fun and easy and because it's not important to anyone and you can experiment with the design as much as you like (I've done tons of redesigns since I launched it a few years back!).

That's an idea. I don't know if I like the idea of anybody being able to read my journal though...

It's not a *personal* journal -- that is, it doesn't have to be intimate, and it probably shouldn't be.

You could do a blog on just about any topic. Zeldman runs a webbish blog, Hixie writes about his experience with web architecture, these guys run a science blog, this guy keeps an Islamic blog... Point: it's not exclusively a personal diary.

Oh and you can, with good software, set up member management and authentication to keep parts or all of your site private.

I agree. I had a personal site for years before I decided to go into designing for clients. It takes time, and practice, and most of all a lot of learning. Read whatever you can get your hands on, study well designed sites, and practice, practice, practice.

A weblog is a very good place to start, even if you talk about nothing more than learning this stuff.

Heck, make up themes, and do page layouts and post them on your weblog, what better way to practice?

Read some graphics tutorials, spend time doing those tutorials. You need to put in a lot of hours and work 'behind the scences' before you think about selling your design services.

But not to worry! We all started out that way, nobody was born a web designer.

I think I'm going to do a duct-tape tutorials website! I know, kinda weird, but kinda funny! Here's the banner that I made real quick:

http://www.freewebs.com/basskickin/banner.png

Dragon... Please, for the love of god enable aliasing in your graphics program.

If it doesn't do aliasing, get something that does (Macromedia.com do a free trial of Fireworks!). Your never going to create quality websites when the edges are all spiky like that...

I originally used anti-aliased edges on my duct tape roll (the text is anti-aliased), but I then realised that it wouldn't work with the inside being filled. I just now realised that if I originally started out with a grey background (instead of transparent) I could have avoided this problem. I think I'll redo it.

I use PSP 6 BTW

Inside is filled? That should have no bearing. You don't use layers?