What am I doing wrong ?

Before I get my wrist slapped, yes I have just discovered the whole thread about layouts and design - sorry I should have looked first

You gotta be creative. Different people define good websites differenly...for instance, all of those cookie-cutter template hosting websites are pieces of you know what, in my opinion.

What I usually do, when I have a new project or customer, is just think about the point of the site and who the target audience is. Once you have this down, grab some paper, and just draw. Draw the website until it looks like you want it to (this doesnt necessarily mean graphics heavy, or JS tricks, or w/e...sometimes simple is good).

Once you have the basic premise of what it will look like, THEN start coding it...and as you code, you will change your mind on certain things, and it will develop even more.

Take a look at my first "professional" website: dscpool.com
Basic table layout, no fancy tricks (OK I used an ILayer....bad me...)...and my client loves it. It took me about 2 days to comeup with the design, and then 2 weeks to flesh out the content.

Good luck.

No slapped wrists, I just moved your thread over.

You might want to start with a new concept and get feedback on it. I'm sure it's just that the design elements that move things from basic to finished aren't really obvious to you, since you're skills are well suited to other areas of development.

I think the hardest problem in webdesigning is being honest about our own designs. Some of us like to pretend our designs are pure genius while other designers are never satisfied with what they do. I think they call it perfectionism.

Don't be so hard on yourself!
Knowing the nuts and bolts of coding is the hard part. I'm an artist by trade and I can draw a pretty picture (or webpage design) but putting that design together and making it work efficiently is the real tough part.

You have a lot more knowledge than I do in the important things that make a website work. Now you just have to be brave and put some pictures together to go along with your work. Test them out here. You can't go wrong with the advice you get here.

And if you just honestly are having too much trouble getting a design together you can colaborate with someone who's design looks you like. Some great design teams have people who only do coding or only do the design. Don't stress over it if you're not perfect at everything.

Thankyou everyone, thats some really good advice, I'll knock up a design and submit it here for review ( slating!!!! ) and I'll review a couple of others in return. I did think about hiring a designer or graphic artist but didnt want to pump hundreds of pounds into something I thought I could do myself. I think my problem is my technical knowledge gets in the way of raw design ideas as I'm alsways thinking about how to code it as opposed to whether it looks good.!

Like Karen said, it's okay if you're not good at everything. It could be that you just need to accept that layout isn't your strength. So what? Nobody is good at everything. Partner up with someone who is good at design and you'll get a great site! I'm sure there are many designers out there who would be willing to trade their design skills for your technical skills. Check out our Market Place section.

A good way to learn is to participate in the critiques section here. Looking at other sites with a critical eye can really help you to figure out what works and what doesn't.

Another good thing to do is to look at other successful sites with the same critical eye. Start at Zeldman.com. He's often pointing out other good sites and talking about the intricacies of web design.

Yet another idea would be to copy another design, just for practice. It will help you to figure out how things were put together if you try to recreate it yourself.

Hope that helps!

Yeah, I have to admit the urge to be a cut-and-paste monster sometimes gets me a bit itchy, but I understand how much hard work people put into these things so I dont bother! Again though some great ideas, you'll all started me off in a completley new direction now - thankyou

Well, you've all got me thinking now. I really think I can't see behind the technology of the site and simplify my thoughts to create a clean crisp look for my website so what I'm going to do is just ask a few questions and probably hire a designer to do my grpahics for me.

* Do you start with designing your index page first or start with the other pages working your way back ?

* Flash Intro's....I should'nt bother really should I ??

* Is it worth putting a text-only & translation feature on a site ?

Cheers

No one mention CSS Zen Garden?

Flash intros - don't bother unless it either solves some problem within the business logic of your application or you just want to have fun with a personal site. Read more opinions here: http://webmaster-forums.net/showthread.php?t=22439

Text-only and translation - a print-friendly feature will be very good to have, particularly if you have essential information on the site, like white papers. Translation is only worth it if your target audience will find it useful.

Design process - this is a tough one. In theory, I favour the idea of planning out all the pages, creating a generic mockup, then adapting it to the content for each page. In reality, I 'design from code' -- that is, I build all the content, hopefully semantically correctly, then I style it and modify the code as needed for presentation. The latter is a more evolutionary process which can have fatal trappings if you're not careful about making a flexible design -- you might later encounter information to build a document for that exceeds the capabilities of the design.

I don't know what advice to give about escaping 'amateurish'. It takes practice, creativity and luck. After a good four years of doing this, I've not had the pleasure of meeting any of them.

Man, that CSS Zen Garden is so beautiful and inspiring! Gets me every time I SO wish I was that good!

Thank you for that link!!

See what I miss by staying out of the loop too long.
I didn't know how to replace headline text with images. Whee... now I can completely rethink my way of putting the pages together.

Guess I need to hang out here more often.

Ok, I've put a sample up with a design I threw together, nice & simple. http://www.easysystemsuk.com/index1.htm

A good start...but a few things:

#1- Convert all your tags to CSS tags...so instead of having something like<small>Hello</small> you have <p class="small">hello</p> with the stylesheet having

#2- Since you're using small tags, I can't read the font. I'm running Firefox, and I have my resolution high, with small font as it is...making the text even smaller is a bad idea.

#3- The scroller at the bottom stutters and is not possible when you convert to CSS

#4- Add some graphics

Good start