Please help me…

[nathandelane]

I am a great programmer, but I lack in the area of creativity, as you will likely soon see. I always try to use W3C-valid XHTML (at least the transitional DTD), CSS, and ECMA(Java)Script. I have gone so far as to create my own charts based on the XHTML and CSS specifications in order to ensure that I don’t accidentally write invalid XHTML. I currently run a single website, and I have written two others specifically. I also work professionally as a web programmer for a company named Vehix.

My current website may be found at http://www.nathandelane.com/

Please help me understand how to make this better. I totally want to overhaul it, and give it some more content. Right now it is simply a basic PHP website. I want to make it bigger, so maybe somebody could direct me to some resources. I like the brownish color, but it’s not my favorite, I also like dark blue and the orange I use. I also want to make a brand (or logo) for myself. There are just so many things, and I am looking for some help with this.

I’d appreciate constructive criticism; not just, "it looks like crap" or "the font is too small (which I know it is)". So what can you give me?

Thanks in advance.

Nathan

[Soh Tanaka]

I like your colors.

But your site is lacking structure.

Check out these great articles for ideas:

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/02 … o-website/
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2007/04 … -approach/
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/03 … echniques/

[Rob MacKay]

it looks crap, and the font is too small…

ONLY JOKING!

come on someone had to say it… lol

The age old problem of the coder/creative. I was just thinking would you be against getting a template or theme? ThemeForestoffers some great themes for WordPress and other CMS style things, where they will not only give you a good quality template, but also a lot of the time the PSD to go with it.

So what I was thinking is, you could get a theme you like, then using the PSD you can change a few bits, colours, or whatever but still have that solid structural layout. Having the PSD would also let you explore it, may be giving you inspiration and ideas to see how its done :)

I dunno just an idea :)

[nathandelane]

Thank you both for your advice. I will definitely look into those templates now. And I will look into those articles as well to understand what you mean by structure.

Thanks.

Nathan

[tomwalters5678]

Right. Well I like where you are trying to go with your site, and as we all know admittance of ‘rubbishness’ is important :) So well done. As sites go I have seen far worse so it isn’t too bad, I think the main problem is the size. Not just of the font, but of the whole site. I think you need to increase the size of the whole site. Of course I could be overlooking the fact that it would be good for mobile devices, but I don’t think I am.

Furthermore I think you need to change your navigation bar, it blends too well with the site, if you see what I mean – it needs to stand out slightly more to just make navigation easier.

Here are some great resources for web design.

https://css-tricks.com/
http://www.webdesignerwall.com/
http://nettuts.com/
http://psd.tutsplus.com/
http://www.netmag.co.uk/

Good luck! And could you post back when you have updated it? I’d love to see how it turns out.

[Author]

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