My First Non Table based Site

[pkinchla]

So I just finished the overhaul of my portfolio site and was wondering if anyone would care to give their 2 cents. I am still a noob when it comes to this stuff but I think I have made a lot of progress over the last year and CSS Tricks has definitely been a big part of this. Any feed back is very much appreciated.

my site

[Ethan27]

Nice site man

One thing I would say is that the header might confuse some people, it takes up to much of the page. You could seperate your logo and menu into different sections and float them to opposite sides and not have the content scroll under it.

The colors are great though and the background image is really cool!

[iancoates]

I agree with Ethan27. Nice site but I wouldn’t keep the header positioned at the top.

[pkinchla]

Thanks for the feedback it is much appreciated. I have been struggling with what to do with the banner. I will try out your suggestions.

Thanks Again!

[renancoelho]

I really like it. However, I think you should make the header a tiny bit smaller. Also, The fixed navigation sounds cool in theory but in practice is not working on this case. I think it will fell much better if it is not fixed. Other, once you fix that I think it will be really nice. Good work!!

[pkinchla]

So I reworked the header a bit using everyones suggestions, and I am not sure how I feel about. I am sold on the idea of fixed navigation. Again, any feedback is much appreciated.

Alternate Banner and Navigation

[ccc630]

I like the alternate much, much more — your content now takes center stage, as opposed to the giant header. It’s a vast improvement!

And, the English teacher in me has to do this: you’ve misspelled ‘probably’ and ‘visiting’ on the front page. There are a few other items that could be cleaned up, but those are errors that will jump out at anyone who visits.

[pkinchla]

So I am now sold on my alternate version. Thanks for all the advice. @ccc630 yeah I still have a great deal of editing to do with the content. The two corrections you found I definitely missed, thanks!

here is the finished navigation with a little bit of tweaking:

finished navigation

one quick question: my encoding for the much greater than sign does not work in ie7, anyone have a quick answer why? I am still so noob to a lot of web design stuff.

Thanks again.

[pkinchla]

The background is huge actually:
1438x 860

I made it big to reduce pixelation when it scales. I have only done testing on my machine :/ with 0SX and xp via bootcamp

[Ethan27]

Mate that is so much better, so much easier to view.

You know you could put a menu in the footer aswell if one of the reasons your menu is fixed is because you want easy navigation. The only reason I say this is because I felt my eyes kept going upto the menu rather than fully concentrating on the text but that could just be the SEO’er coming out in me :-)

Either way very impressed man

[davidlab.be]

Nice site… professional mature colors. I agree with JoshWhite the site is slow and chuncky. Also, the top left portion of content section…the header for the content is white and fades into the background leaving a portion of the black from the content section just hanging there looking like the site is broken somewhat.

[pkinchla]

so I reduced the size of the background image significantly and just to clarify I am using the technique I found here:

perfect resizable background image

It still not going to win any races but is it do-able? should I consider another technique? I played around with some other ideas but nothing I fell in love. I loaded my site without the background image and it seemed a lot faster that I noticed, so I am pretty sure the culprit of my chunky scrolling is the background image.

[noahgelman]

I tried switching the borders of the content areas (#main, #sidebar, etc) from white to the text accent-color, #A6C6FF. I thought it looked really nice. It gives them more definition than just a white border.

I’m not a designer however, I’m not very good at it. Just my opinion though.

[noahgelman]

Also, I’m really impressed you used em’s instead of pixels. They’re tricky.

[pkinchla]

Cool, thanks I’ll try that. Yeah I built it on pixels first then converted to ems and percentages. The plan is to make the layout completely responsive with media queries at some point.

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