Harmony

Hi Monty I love your URL - www.thefoolmonty.co.uk - I think that alone will help get you business as it's memorable. I've compiled a list of good resources on my website for online marketing which you may find helpful - http://www.harmonyst....html#marketing If it hasn't already been said you should also pay close attention to your page titles and meta tags (I noticed there's no metatags at all in your pages) as Google rates these highly in it's search algorithms. There is a nice little metatag generator you can use here - http://www.addme.com/meta.htm Your html code also appears to have a lot of in-line styles and css clogging up the code - this is going to get in the way of natural search engine optimisation, meaning if your site and a competitor's site are pretty much identical but thier's has cleaner code they are going to rank higher. p.s. as a designer, what't the honest opinion on my site? Honestly, and this said with respect in the interest of helping you (and respect for you in asking), it's just awful. The color choice is good - bright happy colors for an audience of children - but elsewhere it's letting you down in almost every respect. It just doesn't look professional by any shake of the stick and that's a shame because you have some great testimonials and photos on there and so you already have some good content to work with, it just needs a good design to put it to work properly. The thing is you can have the best SEO strategy in the world and be no.1 in Google results but if people get to your site and don't feel it's professional enough they'll click off and you lose them. So you get the visitors to your site, but not the conversion to sales. Quality design offers a very real return on investment, I've also posted some info about that here - http://www.harmonyst...investment.html I hope that helps! All the best. Harmony

There's a timeout setting in FileZilla - check "Edit / Settings / Connection", there should be something there called "Keep Alive Settings" - you want to make sure this is enabled. Also make sure you have the latest version of FileZilla as older versions are suspectible to hacking attempts. Hope that helps Harmony

Bank transfer is generally how my client's prefer to pay, and how I prefer to accept payment. For clients outside Australia I use PayPal.

Hi Paul, welcome ! It's nice to another over-30's about the place (31 here).

Very welcome ! Can't wait to see the next preview.

Hi Matt Red and brown are a tricky color scheme to work with and I think you've done well. It is a little heavy handed though and there's some usability issues you should address, my suggestions for improvement are: Move your search box up into the top right corner of the page as that's where people will look for it You might want to consider using a text-replacement technique like Cufon to make the fonts look slicker - http://cufon.shoqolate.com/generate/ . As you're going for simplicity here and a bold color scheme you want to pay as much attention to detail as possible to maximise the elements you do have. The white divider line at the top of the page (beneath the main nav but above "hire me") is too stark - consider toning it down to a pale cream or light beige. Give the "latest" banner corner proper drop shadows so it looks like it's actually wrapping around (not just sitting on top of) the content box. The devil's in the details Your sub-headings ("Services", "What we do", "Our guarantee") need to pop more - I'd suggest making them bigger and, as above, use something like Cufon to give them nice smooth edges which add that extra degree of quality. Also be sure to pay attention to your web content writing, e.g. "Our Guarantee" the g should be lower-case - "Our guarantee" Consider making the background color for the header and footer lighter to lift them more and enhance the visual heirarchy. Consider improving your main nav as people spend a lot of time focusing on main nav buttons, e.g. use a gradient background rather than a flat color, make them bigger, give them a light outline, etc. I hope that helps. Harmony

Hi My name is Harmony Steel, I'm 31 and live in Brisbane, Australia, with my better-half Rori (maker of awesome coffee and pancakes!) I used to be a member of these forums a few years ago and decided to pop back in and say hi now that I have the time again to contribute properly. I'm a senior web designer and html / css developer by trade - I freelance part-time and work for the state government part-time. My portfolio lives at www.harmonysteel.com . I also write free music (ambient / chillout) at www.alarinmusic.com Anyway that's about me in a nutshell. Hello again and thanks for having me Harmony

Sadly no, I've been chatting with the developer and the program only supports Internet Explorer at the moment FireFox support is scheduled for version 3.0 so I'm going to hold off buying it until then.

Get well soon Mr Penguin! I commiserate, stuck home with bronchitis at the moment, but you sound like you're in a lot worse shape! Get plenty of rest, water and good food.

You're coming up at first place for me in Google, maybe it was a temporary glitch?

Don't get me wrong, I love Dreamweaver and have been using it for years, but the constant swapping back and forth between browser and editor when making tiny little css changes (like bumping text up a size, or increasing padding) can become time-consuming and painful on your wrists when you're swapping every 10 seconds for hours at a time. I'm also really impressed with the bookmark function - so far in Dreamweaver the only way I've been able to emulate it is to set up distinct class names and search for them, a pretty clunky solution. The only thing I'm not super happy about with the StyleSpread is it uses IE as the default browser for testing, which is not good considering IE's lack of standards compliance. I've written to the developer to ask about it.

I just found this today through one of my feed links, it's an incredible on-the-fly CSS editor called StyleSpread - http://www.stylespread.com/tour/ Other than saving my already-RSI-tortured wrists from making CSS changes in Dreamweaver, saving, alt-tabbing to a browser, refreshing, checking, going back to Dreamweaver, etc, this thing also allows you to put tabbed bookmarks into your CSS, select colors using a color-picker, and I'm only half-way through the tutorial 0_0

Welcome Boom

Welcome Leon

Hi Neurotoxin I guess the question to be asking yourself here is what direction do you want to head in in web - design or development? From the sounds of it you've already had some exposure to development and have a head for it. Thankfully these days you'll find most (decent) employers will hire one person to do the front end design / html / css / usability / accessibility, and a web developer to do the backend php / javascript / databases / dot net / etc. Personally I'd suggest getting your head around AJAX if you haven't already and getting really good at that because from what I can see there's a *lot* of demand for AJAX programmers right now. Alternatively knowing PHP / MySQL is always a good combination, or possibly dot net or ASP - find out what's in demand in your area and concentrate on that. I hope that helps Really it comes down to deciding if you want to do design or development and making more specific decisions from there.

For any kind of freelance work I always found it safest to charge in increments. Client accepts quote and signs contract - Charge them 30% of the entire fee, don't start any work until this clears. Approval to turn design concepts into html - Charge the next 40% of the remaining total fee. Completion of site on a development environment, approved to go live - Charge the rest of the fee. When paid put the site live. Depending on how much you trust the client you may prefer to get the full fee before this stage (so charge 2 x 50% increments) as if they're dodgy they can just download all the html and run. Remember to build a limited time into your contract for revisions, eg - add a certain number of "buffer" hours to your total fee, or tell the client they have up to 12 hours for revisions once the design concept has been submitted and anything more than this is charged at an hourly rate, and anything not used is refunded. Hope that helps

Mmm social bookmarking is yummy I use Furl because they have a nice offline-page-saving functionality and I'm always scared that I'll bookmark something great only to come back in a few weeks and find a 404. I haven't tried Spurl, does it allow you to save a "hardcopy" of the page on it's database? I've been looking for a service like Furl but with better usability and support.

Thanks guys, I'm very glad it's useful info I've also started using http://browsershots.org/ to test my work since I'm in IT lockdown at my current job, it's such a nifty tool.

Nice! I'm checking this out now. Thanks Thomas

Welcome Manuela

Welcome Fluence !

Welcome

Hehe happy to help ! I just had a hunch that might be the problem and a bit of googling confirmed that it was. If you come across a problem like that again one of the best ways to debug it is to run your css through a validator and then google the keywords to see if anything shows up, eg - "css Parse Error" in your case. Often you'll find a solution straight away, but in this case - with such an obscure error - you're better off getting feedback from other developers like you did. The link kip posted is excellent for learning about doctype rules, also try: http://www.nypl.org/styleguide/xhtml/guidelines.html http://webpageworkshop.co.uk/main/xhtml_index

Welcome Chase ! I think you will definately be able to carve out a niche for yourself in today's web market with a print background, I'm noticing more and more jobs coming up these days for people who can do print as well as web. Your website is looking pretty good so far, I like the white and green color scheme, it's very soothing. I also really like the swirly lines. I would suggest putting some kind of container / border around your content area, at least on the left side, as the swirly lines just stopping dead looks strange. Also bevels are *evil*, learn this now and save yourself much heartache , say it with me "bevels are of the devil!". Seriously bevels, lens flares, big drop shadows, all that nasty stuff that you can tell a mile away was done in Photoshop should be avoided at all costs. And the font for your quote (bottom right) is quite hard to read, as is the menu font, I'd make them bigger and possibly space the letters out a bit more. I hope that helps

Yup the Firefox web developer toolbar is absolutely the way to go, especially since you can set css and html validation to run automatically on each page. The only other way I know of is to manually enter your code or css into the w3c's page validators: HTML - http://validator.w3.org/#validate_by_input CSS - http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/#validate-by-input