ptwebdev.com

I like your design and color choices.. good layout.

I would number the page choices in you portfolio rather than use an arrow for the next page. Because it makes the user revisit each page.. example they are on page 6 and they go to another link.. to go to page 7 of your portfolio they must page through the 6 pages already viewed.

Very nice work.

Nice. I really like the look and feel here. Excellent colour choise and design layout.

I am getting some horizontal scrolling when I resize to 800x600. I think this might look better in general if there was a little less space in between the three boxes. They seem a little too separte from each other. Remember CRAP (or PARC). Proximity of related items is a good thing. Separate them too much and you could use the relationship.

I really like what you've done with the logo. So simple, yet so effective. I also like the repetition of the flowers. It works even though they're not exactly the same.

I think the menu text could have a little more contrast. That might be hard to read for some people.

Looks great. I really like your design style. I'm envious, actually It's really interesting to see your logo examples. I'm really bad at logos so something like that is really helpful.

One small problem - when I go to the e-books page I see a chunk at the bottom with additional print designs. This breaks up the model you've used in all the other sections. Put print designs in their own section.

As far as SEO goes, I don't know a whole lot about that. Do try to put in more text with good keywords. Maybe replace the lead-ins on the front page with more of a description of your services and working style. Use it sort of as a selling point for potential clients, but also as a place to get in some key words for the search engines.

Now I've found a big problem with this. Try to run a validator on the code. Not even close. It looks like you're using Dreamweaver - Shift-F6 gives you the internal valdiator in DW so you can see what the problems are. I notice a lot of mixed case code, unclosed tags, unquoted attributes. DW can fix a lot of this for you automatically. If you haven't already, run file > convert > xhtml. Then do Commands > Clean up xhtml and commands > apply source formatting. Then try validating again, there should definitely be fewer areas.

Granted, most of your clients won't have any idea about this sort of thing but anyone who knows about web development will, and could be turned off by your poor coding. It's also good business practice, IMO. and then you can put up the little "valid xhtml" buttons! Which look impressive even when people don't know what they mean)

Hey all, Thanks for the messages.

Megan, thanks for all of the time you put in on studying my site.
In response, I will try reducing the space on between boxes, that sounds like a great idea, as I have added sufficient padding now within the boxes.
About the source, that is a problem, and I am about to create this site using a much simpler CMS, but right now, the problem lies in Mambo. I will check my template HTML and see if the code issues are on my end, but usually they end up being Mambo's fault. I did code the original template by hand in Dreamweavers editor however, and I hadn't even thought about using it to validate DUH!

It is DEFINITELY my intention to get the rest of my print portfolio pieces on their own scrolling gallery, thanks for noticing that!

Dirty, I have to say that is a very good idea, but I will have to recode someone else's PHP to do that, and frankly don't have time at the moment. I will most likely code my own to produce these in the future, as no-one seems to have a gallery scroller that fits my needs.

Hey Megan, if this was your site, where would you put an orange "Valid xhtml" button that it wouldn't look just plain aweful? hehe

Pat

True, the standard ones wouldn't look great with your colour scheme here (I think they look okay on mine). You can get other buttons though that look a lot better. Zeldman and those guys use them so check around on his site. I think there's a link somewhere in there (except that now I can't find it...)

Hey Megan,

Just so you don't think I am fibbing, check out http://ptwebdev.com/validxhtml.txt so, it does validate, no errors or warnings. Mambo truly does mess up my pretty code

Pat

A link to the the logo client would be nice. e.g. dragonroasted.com - text but no hyperlink.

• Colour scheme - great!
• Where do you get the flowers from?
• "awesome" web design

I actually don't link from there because many of those are not affiliated with any website whatsoever, and the PHP that I use would require either them all to be linked, or none at all to be linked. Thanks for the suggestion though, if I divide this into two different galleries, such as web logos, and other logos, that would work really well! (I don't have that many yet )

Oh, I didn't answer your questions.

Thanks on the color scheme, I really like those colors as well.
The flowers on the left I found on a free stock site some time ago, or maybe during my subscription to ClipArt.com, I can't remember.
The flowers on the logo I photographed in Hawaii, and they became part of my DarkFlower series, which is really pretty cool. I don't have that displayed anywhere but I probably should.
Thanks for the compliments

Påt

Ok, now the entire site is on a new CMS, I have hacked the code to force it to validate, and all is well

I included the absolutely stunning Valid icons on my site even

Pat

A fellow Washingtonian on the board, finally:)

I like the design a lot. Very smooth, it's easy on the eyes. I just noticed a little bit of text above the W3C buttons, are people supposed to be able to read that?

Hey Matt,

Cool, someone else in Washington! Sweeeet. I see on your profile that you motocross. Do any streetbiking? That is where my heart is I moved recently from Idaho, back here to my home state, and I had to leave behind some of my friends, a Ducatti Monster 900sie and a BMW R1100RT. Still kindof crushed by that But I am going to get another pretty soon!

About the site, actually, I am still trying to figure out how to have that text on my front page without having it distract from the look of the place, just like those buttons are doing

I have to go make me some tiny buttons that will fit into my design better.

Pat

Quote: Do any streetbiking?

Not yet, considering I can't be on the road;) (I'm 15) I am going to try it though! I have a CRF250 but I haven't raced for about 2 years now, I started riding in the sand and I can't stop

Hehe, I started riding when I was 16, Yamaha FZR 600 Fun!

Ok, Thanks for all of the comments everyone.

Megan, if you take a look at it now, http://ptwebdev.com you will see that I pulled it together a little bit more, hacked the crap out of a new CMS to make it produce valid XHTML, cleaned up my CSS so it was valid, made new XHTML and CSS valid buttons from a really cool website I found (because those from W3C are just ugly) moved the text in the nav bar to the main content area, and removed the extra print category until I can complete my graphics for those items.

Whew

Did I leave anything out?

Oh yeah, I also added a blog, and a newsletter subscription page, both validate now as well!

Pat

Those are the buttons I was talking about. Maybe try putting them in a footer with that greyed out text. Put another line there to separate it and it'll be okay. Then they're at the bottom where they won't be as distracting. I don't think they're really that bad looking as it is.

i would use more text on your home page ,

the site navigation is easy .

i would also use more color contrast

chad

http://www.freelancewell.com

I am on 1024x768 IE 6.0 also tired in mozilla. I guess you intended to have the left nav area sort of cut off on the left side, but when the white flowers below the nav also gets chopped it just looks like whole page has shifted to the left and been cut off a bit...Otherwise I really like the calm feel that the colors and the layout give.

I think that there should something more on the top. The flowers in the lower left corner look a liitle out of place, maybe that could go on top. I don't really like the brown border that frames the site. On the logo page i think there should be thumbnails of all the logos on one page so that I can pick which one I want to look at.

-Ian

adding grey links with the back ground at the bottom of the home page isn't good practice. If google catches this.. It could be banned.. The use of title tags and alt tags will help with your search engine rankings.. Also exchanging links with other websites will help a lot. Keyword nesting of your title,description, and the body is vital in getting excellent ratings in the search engines. Over all everything else looks great and good job.