Whats your opinion on this?

hmmm... looks ok... although make it less bright and minimize the gradient a little bit, and add a second color... thats my 2 cents...

a name more generic like hardwarezone or hardwarecollection is more appropriate than putting your name to it...

Yup. Rick's Hardare (Needs an apostrophe ) does just sound like a spin-off of Tom's Hardware.

How about going for alliteration - Hardware Help - or something like that. Just be origional, imaginative and have some fun with the name!

I agree with 02bunced about the name.

The graphic is okay but I agree with demonhale about the gradient. It would probably be best to remove that altogether. I do like the right side piece with the pattern, and the orange colour is nice. You could try adding an accent colour like blue.

The text is okay but much too far apart. Try some different fonts there as well.

Something about that "orange" color does not look masculine enough!!! Since this is a "hardware" site, most of your visitors are going to be men (don't mean to sound too sexist), therefore you need to choose more "man-ly" colors.

Here is another version:

Again, the site name is definately going to change, its just there to see how some words would look there. I'm trying to make them look like they are stamped into the metal but my Photoshop skills are limited. I will tone down the brightness once I figure out how to do it .

To do a cut out (stamped effect) use a -1x-1 x1px black drop shadow and a 1x1 x1px white drop shadow (black bottom and right, white top and left), use little blur

I swapped it for another one now, what do you think?

Ok, I have some time off work so I am going to try and finalise the header.

When you say gradient, what exactly do you mean? I an pretty new to photoshop, what I have made so far is by messing with settings, no real skill involved.

The last version I made is where I am right now, except a little smaller to make it 1024X768 friendly. Also I may have come up with a new name, Active Hardware. There is already a site by that name though, although it hasn't been updated in the last year and the forums are a ghost town. I think it is abandoned, but I will contact the webmaster if I can't come up with another name (and buy his domain off him).

I think another colour is a good idea too, but where would you suggest I put it? I thought adding a blue to the colour would be good, but it just doesn't fit in anywhere.

Any suggestions?

a gradient in graphics by definition is a scalar increase or magnitude of color, simply put your background of white slowly increasing in intensity to black is an example of a gradient. Shadow effects sometimes produces gradient too.

Its a good idea to make it smaller as to accomodate for screen width in incorporating it in your design, the new name is good and I hope you can buy it off the old owner and an advantage maybe is that the domain name may have been listed already.

Getting another color for your orange you can base on either a compliment (a blue shade is a complimentary color for orange)... or a color based on the triad...

As a suggestion, maybe you can choose a lighter shade of orange like #FEAB12 or #FF9300 or your existing one and use a complimentary color of blue #0000FF... and lose or minimize the gradient...

Chris

Heres the new header:

**EDIT**
I posted this before reading your post, I didn't ignore you .

I have lowered the gradient, and I think it looks much better. I will experiment with some blues, but I think we are finally getting there!

I agree... and the pattern on the right, you can try and lower its edge shadow effect, and maybe reduce the size of the patterns... good work so far...

the thing is 1000px wide, can't you reduce this to be more user-friendly?

I think that would be a good size, a little smaller than 1024 px so there is no side scrolling for 1024X768 users.

I have a question though, if you look at the header you can see the effects around it, the shadow. Is there any way of removing the effect just on the bottom only? Sort of like an eraser for effects?

Why not use a regular gradient fill and adjust it by using custom controls...
What you did is to buttonize the banner I presume, in this case just use a clone tool to erase or more appropriately copy-over the effect you want to erase...