My Homepage - Please post your thoughts

[deanosrs]

Hi. Just finished making my personal site, which can be found here (http://www.sheps.ft6.com). Any comments or suggestions would be very much appreciated.
Thanks.

[dustinthewind]

I really like it! I have trouble seeing the body text on your home page, maybe a white text? I really love how you did that makepoverty strip on the upper right hand corner. How did you do that?

[deanosrs]

The make poverty history strip is available from makepovertyhistory.org (http://www.makepovertyhistory.org), or more simply you can just put this code in to your site:
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.makepovertyhistory.org/whiteband_small_right.js"> </script><noscript><a href="http://www.makepovertyhistory.org/"> http://www.makepovertyhistory.org</a></noscript>

It's something I do on every site I make, because I feel it's important, and raising awareness doesn't cost anything so more importantly why not?

As for the text - I'll experiment making the background larger. Thanks for pointing that out - my monitor doesn't show it to be a problem, but it might be for other people. I also realise that currently the poll is too big for its box, so to speak, but that shall be sorted soon.

[katharine]

maybe you could make the text to be in a box with a similar style to the headers for each new entry. then the text in the color you have it now would more than likely easier to read and it could give it a bit more structure...

Also, it is a pity that when I have my IE window full size, you have so much blank space.

I found your photos page took a while to load and got bored waiting.

Otherwise, I like how the look of the site flows :) Good luck starting your business.

[shaneLost]

Site looks good, but fix the text so one can view it better.

[comprookie2000]

Way too slow to load.

[hammerstein_04]

It takes AGES to load. I have a 2mb connection, I went, read some news on bbc and the register came back and it only just loaded. Even allowing for my connection not being the fastest that is still quite incredible.

It seems you are using the wonderful dreamweaver in some capacity (based on your image rollover functions), are you using it to write your code, or you hand coding? There seems to be something in the bottom half of your page causing some real issues, I would suggest that it is your poll. I would recommend trying to remove that and see if you speed up page access times.

Hope that is helpful in some capacity

[deanosrs]

All the comments relating to speed were due to my server - it is now working fine. For some reason the mysql database (which needs to be accessed on every page - hence why the photos wouldn't load and the bottom half of the page - where it accesses the blog) wouldn't work. I think I'm just going to make the background of the whole page a lighter grey, I don't want too many boxes in the middle because I want the site to feel "enclosed" by the tentacle shapes. I'm also going to add a few more at the bottom of each page to complete the affect I think.

As for software - yes, I use dreamweaver - and yes it is excellent - but I actually end up handcoding alot of the page. Well, the whole design is done in photoshop and exported using imageready, so the design's tables are all generated from that - but all the html outputted by the scripts has to be handcoded. And there's no content atm that isn't outputted by a script - so dreamweaver serves as little more than a display mechanism at the moment. It's still incredibly useful for its code view options though.

Katharine, I have the same issue with the site - but there's nothing I can do about it. If you're running 1024x768 (which I presume you're not) it takes up a large amount of space. Perhaps I'll try adding a background in to the right of the design.

Thanks for the comments, really appreciate it.
*oh and the blog stuff is the only content that works with this design - everything else is still linked up to the old design, it's taking me ages to skin all the different scripts so they look identical.

[pecakua]

nice layout but i would enhance the style sheets (.css) and maybe change the text colour.

i think you also use too much text which could put of many people and it takes a long time for the gallery to load up

[hammerstein_04]

That's what Dreamweaver is really good for now, as an HTML editor it is great. Better than it used to be as a WYSIWIG editor but still a fantastic all in one package. Unfortunatley, the expense is far too much and I am forced to use free editors. :( But they work, do their job well.

I have noticed a few sites that have real problems accessing databases, and the performance drops quite radically sometimes. Php-freelancers is one, their projects database is just horrible to access.

This looks like a site people are going to know what they are after when they visit, so I don't think the comment about too much text is necessarily valid. All in all looks good, when I get home I shall take another look.

[deanosrs]

There really is nothing I can do about the photos taking ages - it has worked before perfectly, I can only assume it's a temporary error. It's not integrated into the new site yet anyway, I'm working on another project now and don't have time to update it right now.

Could you elaborate about the style sheets? Only it's an area I'm not as experienced in as html, photoshop, dreamweaver etc and would like to know where I'm going wrong! I've also got an idea to have a drop down menu somewhere to switch style sheets, but want to advance my knowledge of css before I do this so any advice anyone could give me would be much appreciated.

Thanks again 4 comments.