Blakebrain Web Design

Hi Blake,

The first thing that caught my attention are your meta tags. Might those be considered spam? I am not a SEO specialist but all of those meta tags and 50 million instances of "web design" in your descriptions and keywords just seem a bit much.

Being the curious one that I am I checked your site at Marketleaps Search Engine Verification and your site isn't listed with any of them at the moment. I suppose you are just getting this thing online are you? Good luck with the Engines.

You have several instances throughout your site where your end font tag () is outside of the or there isn't one at all. Not a biggie I don't guess but it is good to get into the habit of checking those. However, if you used a style sheet you wouldn't have to fiddle with correcting your html editors mistakes.

Several spelling mistakes scattered here and there. Run your text through a spell checker. Those things come in handy.

Now for the design. That brown or gray bar at the top with the code in it doesn't look quiet right. Something about the brown/gray and blue just doesn't seem to match. But that is a personal thing so if you like it then don't worry bout little ole me.

I think your logo could be a little stronger. It sorta seems like it is screaming way out in the distance, "What about me....Hey you! Look, I am a logo. Can't you tell?" LOL

Overall though, I think you have presented your material very well.

hey Blake - looks good in general, but room for improvement in a few areas

the nav system doesn't seem to align correctly in N6

is displaying? - I think you want

Quote: SHAPE="rect"

I don't know much about SEO either, but all that TITLE and META data may be of dubious value

lots of margin at 1024×768

I agree the copy could be improved

The image map has absolutely nothing to do with the main navigation. What's wrong with your monitor? How in the heck does my site look like that? The reason for the large margin at 1024 X 768 is that all my tables are aligned center. It's still known that more users view pages at 800 X 600, so I design for that resolution, with scalability for 1024 X 768. I try to keep away from using positioned layers as they result in a big pile of crap at different monitor resolutions. Anyhow, I think you need a *new* monitor.

Thanks,

Blake

I'm just wondering what image is being mapped

the appearance of that image is the result of saving the screenshot as a GIF - I was just trying to indicate the possible alignment problem in N6 - mmy N6 browser has been quirky on a few pages; maybe this is another example of that

yeah, I know this is center-aligned, but I think (just mmy opinion) that a flexible page structure is preferable - I'd say it's really not a problem at all in this case because there's not much scrolling involved on these pages

Overall this looks nice but I feel that it needs a little bit of tweaking here and there. I think that the logo should definitely be bigger and stand out more. The problem with what's there now is that the grey bar and the yellow bar are very strong elements - dark colours, strong lines and edges. The logo really fades away in comparison.

The other thing I wanted to mention is the portfolio page. The design of this page seems really out of place compared to the others with the dark backgrounds. Another problem is the placement of headers on the page - they look like they're somewhere between centered and right-aligned. I would align them either to the right or left.

I also agree that the copy could use improvement. Watch how you're using commas - this seems to be a very common problem. i.e.:

Quote: Through detailed consultation we will find a pattern, a style for your company, and develope the pattern into a warm, user friendly website. An important aspect of web design, is consistancy.

The first sentence has too many parts, sepearated by commas, as well as a spelling mistake ("develope"). The second sentence should not have a comma at all. This could read something like this:

Quote: Through detailed consultation we will define a unique style for your company. We will then develop these ideas into a warm, user-friendly website. An important aspect of web design is consistency; it joins the site together, giving it unity.

I'm being rather picky here because there aren't to many problems with this site. The design looks very good.

Nav bar doesn't line up in NS and the line at bottom of page is missing in NS. You should make a line using a cell color it and insert a 3 pixel dot and then resize the dot to 1 or 2 pixels. That will make a thin line viewable in all browsers.

Other than that your site looks very professional and easy to navigate.

Good luck,
Gavin

All looks fine for me in NS (4.78 & 6.2) & IE5.5 although I do agree that the logo does look a bit weak, other than what's already been said I think it's very good and projects a good image for your company.