Twisted Creation

Good looking site. Justify your text on your page. I'd try to use a font such as verdana to make it look better. Your main page is too much information. Slice it down and put links to it. If you get a simple graphic program you can put a thin border around those images and they will look a whole like cleaner. Your site does load very quick. I don't know what's going on with your pages title. Read this: http://www.web-inspect.com/ to get some information on how search engines find your site and how to optimize it for better results. Looks good just a few things you need to tweak.

I gotta agree, there's a lot of information on the pages...you may want to think about grouping it into a series of pages under a menu heading eg. Events – kids, private, corporate etc.
If you want to put a border on some or all of the images you could just create a class that has a 1px border and apply it.
Left align your text and try to limit how far it spans across the screen….on a large monitor it gets really hard to read from one side to the other.
Also the contact email on the bottom of the pages goes to webmaster….I don’t know if this is the same person but if it was me I probably wouldn’t send an enquiry about a party to the webmaster. The link to the web designer loads his/her page; I would set this to open in a new window, if I paid for a site that had link to the designer that closed my site and opened theirs I would not be to happy.
But over all not to bad, clean and consistant.

I'm going to be pretty blunt here, okay? Just because I think you need to hear it. If you dont' want to hear it, please don't read this.

I think you have some interesting ideas of what "pleasing, but slightly old-fashioned graphic design" and good layout is. To me this is not pleasing, very outdated, and not particularly well layed out.

This design doesn't speak to me at all. It doesn't do a great job of communicating the service offered. There is a lot of text on here and I don't think it's the best way of communicating the message. Communication on the web needs to be much more straightforward and to the point. It isn't the same as a print brochure or article. Most of this could be set out in bullet points which would be easy to scan and would give people a quick idea of what this is all about.

The front page of a site could give the user, at a glance, a good impression of everything that is offered. You could go witha really basic layout here, simply listing your headers as bullet points, linking to the sections which describe the more fully. With less text the photo would stand out more and the whole thing would be more impressive.

The layout is extremely basic. Header, navbar, text. Nothing at all creative or particularly well thought out. It's just there, nothing special.

Now, the next point I want to make is some basic principles of page design which are being overlooked here:

• Too big text looks tacky. Keep the body text a little smaller than the default size when using sans-serif fonts. Headers should be only slightly larger - not a lot larger
• centering text always looks bad on a screen. Works well in print, but not in design. Centered headings always look amateurish.
• logo and/or header graphic is one of the most important parts of the site. Quality and communication are important.
• page headers should match the links on the navbar. Otherwise people get confused about where they went
• Navigation menus should not include more than 5-7 items. There are exceptions to this, but in most cases navigation menus can be divided into sections. In this case, the "Upcoming events", "references" and "contact me" could be separated out.
• Colour schemes need to be well thought out and coherent. This looks like any old colours were chosen with no eye for coordination. I also think it's good to avoid the six baisc HTML colours - blue, red, magenta, cyan, lime, yellow. Guaranteed to look bad.

Now, I hate to be so harsh but I think you can really learn from this. LOOK at other sites out there and study what they are doing. Work with others if necessary. You can learn this! You've got a ways to go but what you were talking about in that other thread is doable.

All right, second attempt at a reply to this.

I've gotten some ideas here which I will give serious thought to making use of. This is to the good, and a benefit to me. Thank you all very much for your comments.

Some things you've said will cause me to make some changes. Some things you all have said, I am utterly opposed to. Some things you;ve said will make me go "Huh?"

Its been suggested I use verdana. Huh? All my body text is in verdana. The only thing that isn't is the headlines, which are in garamond, since designers seem to have such a strong hatred for times.

Its been suggested that centered text is generally a bad thing, and I should left align everything. I'd have to guess that at least 95% of the text on my pages are left aligned. Its been suggested that I ought to justify my body text. Everything I have ever read, in print or on the web indicates this is a bad idea, and almost any example I have ever seen backs this up.

A few years back, the indication was to avoid putting a border on pictures to avoid them looking like links. From the comments here, I take it this 'taboo' has faded away. Since I actually have always liked a light border around pictures (it comes from my newspaper days) I look forward to putting this into effect.

Changing which e-mail address is on the bottom of the page and switching over to the page link loading up a new window are minor changes which I have no objections to, and can see the point of. Thanks for the comments.

On the depth of the home page and the titles, I'm a little bit torn. For myself, I prefer simpler to more complex. In the past, I have always used very short page titles that aligned very closely with what the links and page headers said. Problem is, I have been reading several books and web sites on search engine optimization, recently, and they all have been indicating that very discriptive page titles with several of your top key words and if possible, even a phone number can be key to getting better search engine rankings, and more click-throughs from those rankings. Do I like the complexity of it? No. Was I willing to try it? Yes.

If anybody has anything they would like to recommend that doesn't sacrifice simplicity for rankings, feel free to provide titles or links, as I'd love to go back to the more simple titles.

While I have never heard of this 'seven items in a menu section' policy, I'll admit I don't see any harm in providing a further bit of headers to divide things a little further. Text size, I still have to work on a little. Perhaps if I delve back into my css book a bit, I can find a good solution to the text size which will work well on various screen resolutions. Right now, my text is sized perfectly on 1024x768 and fairly good on 800x600, but it is absolutely hideous on 640x480. At least with css, the changes will be incredibly simple to make.

I don't agree with a lot of things that are said here, and more importantly, my customers don't seem to agree, either. But interpreting comments, and hunting for common ground between the viewpoints could lead to designs that are more acceptable to everybody ... so once again, even if you all despise me for my reactions to your comments (and hopefully you don't), thank you. They still give me much to think on.

Well, most of the smaller suggestions here have now been put into effect.

Some major work on the homepage is still to come.

But again, thank you for all the comments ... they have led to several changes, already.

I get the idea right away about being a balloon site.

Personally I believe the right side of the page is more comfortable area for the navigation.

I thought it was hard to see the links because of the background color was blending into the text link color.

Too much reading for me for the homepage. I would like bulletted(?) list of services.

I think all the services can be listed in one page with more efficient description of the services.

I like your business. Wish you the best

My first impression of your website is that it looks too basic. You website looks as if it was designed by someone who is learning how to design websites. For what it is your website shoulkd have brighter colors and a more lively theme.
Scorpio189

Just those few small changes have really tidied things up…..starting to look more professional

doesn't work for me