jtuds

Using a template for your portfolio site is like me sending a video of Lionel Messi to Manchester United and asking them to sign me.

They've just announced a family of products branded Edge at Adobe. I don't really trust Adobe when it comes to web products, in the past it's been like they've tried to say using their tools makes everyone a brilliant developer which we all know is nonsense but this stuff seems to work with and for developers and does looks quite good. I particularly like the look of Reflow which looks like it's going to allow designers to create like they would in Photoshop but with a responsive angle, so everything is going to be resizeable meaning designs will be responsive from the outset and not just ported from a single fixed width design. The new web fonts service looks good too.
 
http://html.adobe.com/edge/

The only way to keep it exactly the same on every browser and every screen size is by using an image. You shouldn't have to aim towards making your site look exactly the same, the design should provide good functionality regardless of minor aesthetic differences, any major ones that do affect functionality can be fixed accordingly to be minor.

I wonder how many meetings it took to come up with that when in reality I could have popped into the office, shouted sans-serif and popped out again.

I wonder how many meetings it took to come up with that when in reality I could have popped into the office, shouted sans-serif and popped out again.

Yeh Quicksand isn't very readable at all, Arial looks OK. You could do with 2 basic little white arrows on either side of your slider. On your services page it would make sense to me to make those images the other colour on hover so the blue ones go to red and vice versa, just to keep with your navigation style. You have a couple of links on your contact page, the colour is really faint, I'd just give these a blue underline and red underline on hover. It would be good if you implemented Google Maps instead of an image.
 
Overall though, nice design, just needs ironing out.

I can see the OP was a bit discouraged by a couple of posts so I'd just like to add, that second design is an impressive improvement on the first, you've taken and used the criticism really well there.
 
I'd suggest having a really good look for a font for your banner, it's a big part of the design and though I think a serif font is suitable I don't think the one you are using at the moment does the rest of the design justice. Make your banner text actual text as well rather than an image, that goes for your links as well, real text and no images where possible though I'd keep the little icons in some capacity as I think they work well. Could you try and make each one change colour on hover?
 
Other than that there's probably a fair bit you could improve which I personally couldn't help you much with simply because I don't have lots of experience with e-commerce sites and they really are a different kettle of fish. What I would suggest is keeping your homepage as simple as possible and getting rid of that text below your products, is anyone going to read that? I think just when you think it's ready you should come here for feedback again and explicitly ask for e-commerce tips if you're serious about sales because I'm sure some of the users on here could really help you on that front.
 
Hope this helps, good effort overall.

...hmm, I've literally just started learning web design and after reading a lot of comments, it doesn't sound good career wise but too be honest I don't care. I'd rather earn 15k a year doing something I love rather than 30k a year doing something I hate and not wanting to get up in the morning like A LOT of people. I was wondering about qualifications about the industry and whether they were important or not. 80% of web designer/developers seem to say no i find but yet most jobs seemed to ask for them? anyways, by the time i become marketable enough to apply for a job in this field i will be 23-25 which seems old to start a career so it will be even harder for me to get a job! but oh well, at least if i enjoy it thats all that matters..

Have a look at this http://jsfiddle.net/2qkNE/1/
 
That is the basics of how to achieve what you're trying to do. I've set the heights to try and demonstrate how they cut the the text by giving the left col less height than the right (that rhymed). It's pretty much as Wickham has described it. If you are sure you're following this code structure then I would check your class names to make sure they match up and generally check for little errors like that.

Taking what you want (70% image then text) you could wrap a div around the images and call that col-left and one around the text and call that col-right. Depending on your container/wrap size you set a width for those divs accordingly. You say you want the image to take up 70% so you would set the widths to something like 600px - 300px respectively. This tells the divs how much room on the page they can occupy. What you'll be left with at that stage is images taking up 70% of the page then text below those images taking up 30% so what you need to do is allow the text to come up against the images and occupy the remaining 30% you've allowed for it which is where float comes in. Assigning a float to both these divs (I would assign float left to both I don't see why float right is needed when widths are specified but I'm happy for someone to correct me on that?) will break them from the usual flow of the page and they will float furthers to the top and left that they can. Therefore your content above the floats will stop them going too far up, your container/wrap will stop them going too far left and the width of col-left will define how far col-right can go to the left which gives you that 2-col effect. Because you have defined a width, aslong as col-right can fit in the space to the right of col-left, because it is floated, it will go and occupy that space.
 
There's probably some holes in that explanation and there is various different tweaks to achieve what you want but hopefully that should get the actual concept of it across to you.
 
Here's a general question; What would happen if you gave col-left and col-right display:inline? Can display be given to wrappers in that fashion, i.e. make the whole wrapper inline thus allowing room to the right of col-left?

You need to keep your emails table based and forget CSS for anything but colors and fonts. You'll soon discover if you start using CSS for layout that it will look all over the place in all the various email clients. There just isn't the support for CSS to use it in any reliable way. You'll have enough trouble getting the table layouts to work because the clients have so many varying defaults.

That's obviously a bit of a drastic measure but what I would say is don't be afraid to use images to achieve tricky parts of the design. For example, when I build emails newsletters I often have to have a link which has a coloured box around it. You could do this with tables by adding rows and columns on all sides of the link to add a spacing effect but it's much easier and more reliable to make the whole box and link an image.

http://rocketdock.com/
 
Enjoy, it's super useful! I keep all my webdesign stuff in there, well 80% of it.

Have a look here for browser support http://caniuse.com/css-gradients
 
Just use a solid background as a fallback. CSS3Pie will help you with IE support.

My first impression : it isn't too bad. I like the header and navigation.
I think the stretched image does ruin the look, as you say... but this is not too hard to fix?
Overall I just get the impression that it just needs a bit of finishing off, but it has potential.
I definitely don't think it's so bad that you'd be better off starting again... a bit of finishing off and you could proudly show it as the first website you created on your Portfolio in my opinion
 
Good luck

I'm a sucker for anything free lol
 
I really like the SM network and this is something not to be missed, if you not got twitter then please PM me and ill email you the .pdf
 
http://freelanceswitch.com/general/get-a-free-copy-of-smashingmagazines-freelancer-ebook/

I cant be bothered to read the whole thread, but one tip - Put in a static scrollbar so it doesnt look like the website jumps left to right on certain pages.
 
Got quite a bit of work to do on this, need to minimalise it and I would align the 'banner/logo' left and have that as the Logo. And, for the life of me don't stretch images, If an image is too small, don't use it, get a different one, personally I think thats quite un proffesional.

Really? I've never known anyone to ever do that

I've done that before.
It's actually very useful. Specially when using effects like and open and close box with lots of content in it. I'll try to find an example...