Alex Rees

I would use the blue from your logo in the menu and footer bars, with light font. The grey you've chosen falls between two stools, as illustrated by the fact you have dark text in the top bar, and light text in the bottom bar, both of which are hard to read!

Very good, yet also slightly depressing!

The site doesn't work well on smaller resolutions. You end up with a black empty column on the left and half the website off the page to the right.

Building websites is essentially a highly skilled technical job, and there really aren't any shortcuts. Most academic course will not be much good, because the lecturers will be teaching out of date techniques. You need to learn by doing and by using Google. To start with, just hire some cheap web hosting and put an index.php in the root directory with "hello world" in it and build from there. Learn to use a content management system like Wordpress. Start by building free websites for anyone you can find then gradually charge more as you build up a portfolio.

I use Joomla a lot and I really like it. It will save you a huge amount of php coding. That said, if you want to build more complicated websites, some custom php coding is almost inevitable since extensions normally won't do exactly what your requirements are. As for Jquery, you can add it yourself, but there are plenty of free extensions which use jquery or mootools... it's probably a good idea to check them out and see if they do what you want or can be modified.

I stumbled across this forum just now... We've all thought that our favourite forums are getting overrun by SEO spammers, but I've never seen a forum actually strangled out of existence! Nothing but thread after thread, page after page of cheap drugs spam http://www.indianwebdevs.com/

Hi Andy, I checked it in IE 7,8 and 9 and it looks the same as Firefox. Did you fix it?

I would say Gimp is the best free alternative to photoshop. It can take a while to get the hang of though

Wow thanks, I thought it was Klingon.

If you look at the source of this website a good 95% of it is javascript. Does anyone know what it is? advancedappliancecare.co.uk/

It might be easier for you to just install something like the Google XML Sitemaps plugin. This will automatically generate an XML sitemap for you.

I like the design, nice and simple which is something I'm starting to appreciate the more commercial sites I develop. I would change the style of 'resume' so it doesn't look like a heading. For a moment I thought it was a broken 4th heading. From an SEO point of view you should add some header tags so that Google knows which bits are important. At least an H1 around your logo and h2 around the headings at the bottom.

I use link diagnosis firefox plugin. Means you can just right click on a webpage and get a list of the backlinks. Like most (all?) backlink tools it doesn't seem to give a complete list, but it's still very useful linkdiagnosis.com

I don't think it's worth fighting against cheap templates. The key is to create added value for clients. The vast majority of small businesses out there will not want to spend days messing around installing templates.

ok thanks I'll do the same. It's frustrating because there are sites out there using publicity wallpaper pictures which I want to use, but I can't get a definite answer on the legality of it. For example: jamesalistair.co.uk mobileecuremapping.co.uk masperformance.co.uk