Reply To: Site review and critique please?

[Steven Watson]

Hi @daveontrak

I will give you my own opinion, take from it what you want, as it is your website, remember that everyone has different preferences :)

#1) Background: I’m not really digging the noise effect on the background, maybe a solid colour would suffice, preferably a bright colour, or even try looking up some background patterns from Subtle Patterns. It’s a great resource that I have used many times in the past for my designs.

#2) I don’t really ‘get’ the logo, I get the feeling that I am visiting a coffee shop website. The cup of coffee is quite blurry like it has been taken from Clip Art or something similar to which you have added a fancy font to finish it.

I see you have a black ‘p’ and an orange ‘d’ that overlap in your favicon, it’s usually best to keep these things consistent, maybe you could work from that logo and make something more eye-catching for the end user.

#3) I like the navigation and also the fact that the website is responsive, I don’t really like how the page links turn bright green once you have visited a page. It doesn’t really go well with the royal blue colour underneath, again, maybe try working with some different colours, some that look similar to your logo colour(s) to keep it consistent.

#4) Regarding the images on your website, they seem quite out-dated to me, especially this day in age where designers are using font-icons, SVG’s and much more, these produce higher quality designs IMO.

#5) I notice that you use the zooming effect quite often throughout the website, particularly on the contact page with the mini-map, however once you have hovered over the map, it becomes out of focus.

#6) Lastly, I notice that your website is static, however I could be wrong, as you have a portfolio page, I would assume that you would be updating the content quite often with your latest projects, it may me best to look into some sort of CMS such as WordPress, Kirby, Joomla etc.

Overall, I think you have a solid foundation to work from, look around for local freelance web designer/front end developer websites for some inspiration and ideas.

I hope I have helped man, I wish you all the best.