Preliminary Design

the website does not take much of the screen and that is a problem. It is just a small box surrounded by a big red background.

The red background is also too much, too bright, if you know what i mean.

I agree about the red background. Especially since it's a gradient. That is a little too much.

The ?'s (I'm seeing boxes) might have something to do with not having character encoding in there. Get a doctype while you're at it

The design is okay. I like the logo text part but not the little guy with the @. That's a little lame IMO. Try to avoid direct symbols of the web like @ or a spider web, or a globe or some other kitchy thing. It's all been done before (and 10 years ago!). Be more creative. That text logo would stand on it's own if the rest of the design was more interesting.

The navbar needs some work as well. Better use of CSS could make that look more like a graphical navbar rather than some text with bad arrows in between.

It's really not bad for a start - decent logo, good colour scheme. The lower half of the page is good.

Thanks for the advice, both of you. I really appreciate all of the comments. I can see some things that look a lot worse than they did last night at 10PM now.

I have created a new design and I'd like to know what you think of it. I think it is much better than my other one.

Again, please try to visualize it without the ads.

Some things that will not work:
-All forms
-There aren't any FAQs, just the set up
-The link in the "Mailing List" box
-The date will remain "April 23, 2006" until the PHP is set up

Again, the site is:

http://graphicx.cv.vc

did you try viewing that in firefox? it's completely broken :

Oh, thanks. I'll try to fix it...

No worries.

Also i noticed that in different browsers, there are some parts with colour discrepancies :

Well, apparently that Internet Explorer you are are using isn't recognizing the transparency or something, but it looks right on mine.

Here is what it should look like:

After I get some dinner I'm going to work on fixing it and validating it and finishing what I was going for.

Yeah, it's IE 6 which about 90%+ of people use so probably the one you ought to adhere to i'd say

Oh, I understand. I'm working on it.

Definitely no way you'll get PNG transparencies to work in IE6 so you shouldn't try to fix em, just use normal backgrounds

I tried to get everything fixed that I could. Let me know if there's anything else that isn't quite right. Thanks.

Oh, and I'd still love some more opinions on the actual design.

Regarding this actual design :

I think the tabs are too large and the angles on them are too shear, a softer form might work nicer. The header part seems nice for the most part, is there any significance in the arrow thing? Or just a photoshop custom shape thrown in for good measure? Just seems a bit out of place to me.

I was going to say that your 'packages' page doesn't display the prices then I realised you don't charge actual cash for your designs. I dunno about anyone else, but I think you should be charging, especially for your PHP work - this is a skilled trade and if you are good at it, you can earn a good amount. Having such deals as paying byu adding an affiliate button or a text link kind of makes me, as a potential client, think that the standard of your work must match your prices.

The arrow is basically symbolic of the slogan ("Guiding you to a great web design")

I like the oversized design. There isn't much content on the site, so I tried to overplay it with large graphics and gradients.

Here's the thing with the packages. I don't take money for one really big reason that I don't want to reveal, but also for another. I am trying to target smaller starting businesses and non-profit organizations that don't have the money to spend on an expensive design for their website, but can offer a little ad for me. Once I get a lot more visitors, I would like to expand my horizons beyond web design to web development and forums and members and everything, but I am trying to start out small and let my customers advertise for me.

Thanks again for your feedback.

EDIT:

I'm also interested to know if the design looks right now in your browser.

No mate, the tabs are still messed up in firefox.