Ist time design need advice.

Well lets see here.

The burnin text seems out of place and the links are in an odd place. I think if you reworked the layout of things it will look much better. The little paintball dudes are cool though

I wipped up something real quick for you to look at
click here

Hopefully that will give ya some ideas

>>Someone said I should have more
links back to the homepage and my contact details on
every page.<<

Yes your home page should be accessible from every page. Visitors should be able to get to a contact form or an email address from every page. Make it easy for them to contact you.

>>Also should I keep it simple or add some flash stuff?<<

Keep it simple. Look at most of the big expensive sites out there. They hardly use any flash. (Some people can’t view flash). Check out some of them:

http://www.people.com
http://www.bbc.co.uk/?ok
http://abcnews.go.com/
http://www.vario.com/
http://www.bcentral.com/default.asp
http://www.cafepress.com/cp/info/index.aspx
http://www.fool.com/
http://thriveonline.oxygen.com/
http://www.theknot.com/
http://www.cnn.com/

These are the types of sites I get inspiration from.

Have fun designing,
Gavin

Eew! That light green really clashes with the red. Badly. Try something else. Those clip-art images are pretty bad too. The fire effect on the logo is tacky as well and doesn't seem appropriate to your topic.

You need to start over. Find a better colour scheme. Get a better logo - maybe some dripping paint effect or something. Get a good photo of someone playing paintball and put it on the front page. Make a navigation menu that will appear on every page. Look at what other people are doing - you'll find that these are elements that are common to most well designed pages.

I think that you should get the rest of your design in order before adding anything fancy. Flash is really unnecessary for an information-based site like this one.

Thanks for the comments so far.

With regards to "FLASH" I ment something a bit more
flashy, eg elaborate, flamboyant, decorative . Not use Flash. Sorry my mistake. I do need a new logo.

Regards

Jeff

I think most areas have been covered, ie in need of a theme and color scheme.
but a few other areas, the picture pages are to big, file sizes are massive, maybe offer thumbnails
The questions page looks very unfinished, the questions graphic alone is 48kb, way to big, whats flames got to do with paintball? if anything is how it feels to be hit with one at close range, and it stings - loose the flames.
your funny picture is funny because?

And yes you need links from your pages, I'd suggest a sitemap (list of all yoru pages) so people can jump to any page with ease.

Z28cam's idea for your logo is a good one, maybe not quite as deep thou, something to work around.

wide borders etc dont do anything for your layout

I agree you need to rethink the colours, layout & logo. I would have a white background, do something like Z28cam's idea for the logo and create a navigation bar which will go on each page. Maybe a paint splat with text inside it for each link.

As for the photo's, I think it'd be better to have them all on one page - in sections - as thumbnails with a click to enlarge. You also could do with a caption or description for each one, either as the alt tag or under each picture.

I recomment you to not use pictures larger that max 20 kb. Even if I have a Cable connection with 768 kbps download, you will have to think that there are lot of your readers who will be using 28.000 modem and otehr slow connections.

The pictures are great for people to see what's going on and to make people interested. But use thumb's instead.

When using tables you should remove the border.

The pages should also be made so that viewers with 640x480 resolution could see the whole page too.

These are my opinions! (I agree with the other comments)