Any advice/feedback welcome (christmanncreative.co.uk)

Hey cool site there, with validation too, maybe you can go xhtml next try... Just jokin' Anyways you have a good hand there for drawing and illustrations...

For my .2, the little fire figures are links but is not obvious enough for visitors, you also need some division lines for your texts to make it look more organized... Other than those, it looks good... I think you have a good concept of colors...

xhtml? what's that? lol

but seriously, thanks for your comments.

The main navigation is the vertical nav menu and the little fire sprites are just extras as identical links. I would have thought the "on state" of the fire sprites was quite obvious enough to suggest they are links but it is interesting you should say that.
Some people have said in the past I should have stuck with one colour design (the main orange which is the colour and design I use on stationery) but as I designed and built it as a novice, I would never have forseen it as a problem. Now I'm far to precious of the different colour design for the different pages as it obviously ties in with the "4 Element" character designs which feature as a theme throughout the site as signature characters with each page colour corresponding with whatever 4 Elements character is featured on it.

Hello

The graphical design looks very nice.

Thanks

Yeah As a form of tip, when designing it is best to stay on the 3-color and below limits, if you can stick with just one the better... Anyways, on that little sprite thinies, even though their identical with the sidebar links, a little artsy-fartsy text graphics at the bottom could be added to add more jazz... as far as I know the main text area seems some kind of disconnected with the site... Maybe you can do something about it...

Love it!! Great site, great artwork. It all looks very proffesional.xx

Nice artowrk and unique design - impressive

garethcbrown, that looks great I Like the text color and the art is very good. Only thing I would like to see would be to have the sprites also include the button text under them in both states and just add the glow(not red but burnt orange to match the site) on the 2nd state. Other then that it looks really nice. Can you also PM me your rates I am in need or a cartoon type duck

Very nice site well set out images. Looks great only one problem i that i can see is the w3c validation gif is on the only page that does not validate other than that the site looks great

That is a great site!! Speaking as someone that can't draw a straight line, even with the aid of a ruler, I'm dazzled by your talent! Did you code that site? Or did you hire someone? If you did it, then you have a rare gift. It is highly unusual to find a talented artist that can write, or even understand, code.

I would lose this bit, though:

"Please Please Please! I don't mind you posting my caricatures in forums as long as you provide a link to my homepage. I can track all instances of image theft though my webstats. All images and site content copyright protected © 2004-2006 Gareth Christmann-Brown. Images are strictly only to be used with the artist's permission. Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988."

You can't track people who take an image and put it on a server and never hotlink to your site. That kind of thing makes people want to steal your images simply because they can and you think, or assert, that they can't. That's human nature, especially the nature of younger humans.

Just my .02

Hey I can Draw, give me a holler incase you need some drawings...

I can't draw at all... Hell, I can hardly read my own handwriting! Seriously...

But, I'm real good at code. I'm very left-brained - highly logical and analytical, but not artistic at all, I'm afraid.

By the way, I really like the looks of your site, but the code could use some attention, methinks. In my case, the code will be perfect, but the artistic flair will be missing. As I said in my earlier post, very few people can be good at both science and art.

Da'Vinci was. There aren't a lot of DaVincis running around loose in the world.

The homepage wasn't validating because the no right click script had stopped working for some reason? Even when I re-wrote it, it still wouldn't work and yet FF validator showed no errors. So I just took the script off that page.

I've changed the message to the more agreeable one I had before which is just a simple copyright notice.

No right click scripts really annoy me anyway, a novelty 10 years ago maybe.

Looking at your source code you have a huge amount of Javascript which should be externally linked. You could also do with a lot more keyword rich text on the homepage.

No right click scripts annoy me too but I would rather have it than not so as to make people aware of copyright. Even if people stealing images ignore it I feel it should still be there especially in my business. It's just to serve as a notice. As I have tried and failed to implement .htaccess hotlink protection until I can upgrade my service I will stick with no right click script for now.

I only recently found out that it was possible have the javascript externally linked but not sure how to do this. It does need to be done you are quite right. Any pointers would be appreciated.

In your header, have this line of code:

<script src="http://www.site.com/script.js" language="javascript"type="text/javascript"></script>

Paste all of your JavaScript into Notepad without the start and end tags and save it with the .js type. Job done.

-Rob

Just noticed you're from Sevenoaks Gareth. My dad lives there! Small world.

The graphics on this site are awesome. One thing I noticed was that, in Opera 7.54, when I open the Contact page, the text field boxes (specifically the comments one) sits on top of the wonderful graphic that is probably supposed to be below it.