Please review my first website!

For a first time, it is not at all bad. Well done! Just a couple of points:

1) Grammar. Yes, I know it's boring, but it can make the world of difference to the success of your website:

Quote: learn all about pottery making; including throwing techniques

There should be no semi-colon after making, as the first 'including' does not signify the start of a dominant clause which should follow a semi-colon.

2) If you are asking for e-mail address, you may wish to put a privacy statement saying that you will not sell their addresses to spam-bots etc - this will put more confidence in your visitors.

3) Some sort of hover effect on the links on the side would be nice, as it shows your site is still alive!

4) On the tutorials page, adding some space between the sides of the form and the side of the table cell will help make filling the form in more pleasurable.

All in all, well done; I hope you continue your skill.

David

thanks dave for a quick reply, i will continue to post messages for myself and others!

Not bad at all. Some of the pages don't work though. Also sometimes the screen moves. What I mean is on one page there is no horizontal scrolling and on another there is. But that's great for a first try! I remember my first try. It was just a table, an image some links and a javascript thing........it really sucked

lol, my first try was with someone elses Moveable type and a bunch of animated GIFs. Then I moved on to tables, and now with relief I have move off tables again in favour of CSS positioning

Yes one of you mentioned that the screen moved. I have noticed that as well. It seems to become wider in certain pages? the website is still under construction that is why some pages/most pages are not working and the forms dont work either.

Thanks for all you encouragement and opinions. You have been helpful.

regards;

TIm

Yeah, not bad for a first try, I'd try and add a few images to convey more visually that it's a pottery site.

and just thought you'd like to know that there's a couple typos in the tutorial

Quote: Note that if your barnish your pots

Well, it's good for the first try.

I like the logo in the upper left but you are missing one crucial part - the site name. I know that you have it below in the text - but I feel it needs to be more prominant.

Brooke

I have to agree with Brooke. The single biggest thing that jumped out at me was no site name.

However, I do think that you've done a fantastic job, given that this is your first site. Way better than my personal early work.

Nice Implementation, Yes Check Grammar, maybe better theme???

Nice site. The only problem I had was part of the screen was cut off. Loaded nicely. Great site.
carol777

Great site. It loads pretty fast. You could utilise the space below the menu bar and on the right to feature works as well.

Nice site. The 1st thing I noticed was the contrast between the font and the background was very weak---- hard to see the text clearly.........I had to strain to read it. You might want to try to make it more easily read.

I think that is a great first website. Make sure you proof read every page though, i know it's 'just' a hobby page but its good to get into the habit!

-Rob

Brilliant work for first site! however, you have forgotten a couple of page titles and no home button on the menu system, I know its on the logo but thats irratating for lots of users. Like the buttons and the nav, all good. Grammar, and finally dont like the grey text, but the last is just my opinion. Good work you will be hammering them out in no time

You've done a nice job with your first attempt. Depending on how much time you have to devote to making it better, you've provided yourself with a fine starting point.

I also agree with the comments concerning grammar and misspelling. You state that your site is a place to buy pottery-related products. You must appear (you must be) credible and mistakes like grammatical errors are not conducive to that appearance.

I agree with the others, this is a marvellous first-site - wish my first site was this good!!!

Love the logo, although it's constant flashing is somewhat annoying. Also the brown looks very dirty and on some of the pages lower in the tree have clashing colours that look especially bad mixed with that brown (in particular the glazes page). Gray text is a bit hard to read and needs to be a bit darker. In addition there are no heading tags, not only are these good for accessibility (all part of good document structure) but search engines weight the text in h1 tags greater than just p or div elements (subject to change of course).

The mystery meat navigation on the top-right of every page is not good, relying on images for navigation alone is bad accessibility, not only this but you can't tell immediately what every link leads to.

You should also test your pages in a wider range of browsers, I use Opera 8 and the link for the current page isn't working properly. There is also a horizontal scrollbar at 800x600.

So the colours need to be changed a bit, document structure requires an overhaul and testing using different browsers and vs. validation (http://validator.w3.org for instance) should be performed... Nearly there!

Ben,

Nice color choice, and I would offer one suggestion... turn off the blink on your header. I find it distracting, and from my own experience traffic is turned away. I have tired it with and without.

It has been mentioned, but feature some of the pottery on your home page.

Best of Luck

I totally agree with JeevesBond and Dirty_Dawg - the blinking logo drives me nuts. I would get rid of it.

About the colors - I feel that you have the brown and the other colors are not matching the same tone. Many are too bright - I would take a look at that. Also - the top green color you have on the 'add a link' page does not match the greens on the top of the 'articles' page and the 'glazes' page.

The orange buttons on the side nav are kind of icky looking to me. And I am not really big on the blinking. I also don't like the hover yellow color (maybe a nice lighter blue?) and how the text becomes so small. I would leave the text as is but keep the hover.

This is a really good site - you have done a good job!

Brooke

Very good for first page but i think i saw that design somewhere. Maybe i'm wrong.
You should choose another font color.

Hey guys thanks for all the help, wasn't expecting such an enormous amount of feed back. I agree with all, yes i have been busy! Thanks again good help.

Well we've given you plenty of work to do

Let us know how you get on!