Opinions Please

[shagzdesign]

I am new to the web development world, and this is v2.0 of my site, I was wondering if anyone can take a look and suggest anything I might have missed, it looks good to me but I designed it, and we all know that your audience doesn’t see your designs the same way you do. I really need some constructive criticism from a community with the knowledge base that I am striving to learn. Any optimization tips or anything would be helpful.

http://shagzdesign.com

Thanks in advance!

[thisishard]

yeah, its too much effort to read the text in the footer and sidebar. Also, I’m not sure if any businesses put advertisements that are not there own products on there sites, i.e. the google adds on your site probably shouldn’t be there. With the amount of traffic personal design sites tend to get it is unlikely to make you money anyway.

[shagzdesign]

Well I changed the font color to white, I will be adding some sections to the site that will generate quite a bit more traffic, but I’m already way over the benchmarks for sites of this type. I’ll be posting some tutorials and a forum soon, so the ads might do a little better, I’ll leave them for now and see what comes of it. Thanks for the advice though. Any other thoughts?

[jamygolden]

The site is definitely too dark. It took my eyes a while to adjust properly (Coming from css-tricks which is much brighter). The logo is fairly difficult to read on the dark background and the navigation is even more difficult to read (not to mention the hover states). The contrast between the white background of the google adds and the rest of the website is quite odd.

So to sum it all up, lighten things up a bit! I’m actually busy redesigning my site (which will be lighter) at the moment.

[EhhWhat]

From a usability perspective when you click on the ‘gallery’ section you then have to click again to see any examples. Why not just show the examples on the actual ‘gallery’ page?

[sacha]

The web design industry is hugely competitive, 10 years ago the design of a site wasn’t that important, now it’s MASSIVE. I’d suggest you spend a lot of time looking at other designers portfolio’s as well as design tutorials looking at popular web design trends.

Typography is becoming increasingly important, and I think you could work on the typography of your site, also as others have said, you are using a lot of dark, bland colours. If you want to have a dark background you should make use of contrast. Here is a good example of a design site that makes good use of contrasting colours and some nice typography on a dark textured background, http://wedesignwise.com/

And here is a link to a list of dark portfolio sites… LINK

Lastly, don’t rush it. Don’t bite off more than you can chew, and commit yourself to bettering yourself! “Don’t bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.” – William Faulkner

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