Dove

The wing idea could certainly work, many great connotations with the wing idea. I'd consider simplifying your shape of the wing, make it more elegant and without the perspective, I would include less feather outlines. Just a flat side elevation of spread wing, like well, one of these, http://dezignus.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/wings-silhouettes.png (no stealing these though!) Also lose the blood, people don't like blood shoved in their faces. In summation, good idea, just needs to be executed a bit more elegantly.

I take it the cityscape shadow is supposed to be pointing perpendicular to the rest of the shadow directions? I personally think it looks out of place, and consequently distracting. On the about page (and others using this layout), your left column is slightly too wide, and there's not enough space between the two columns, perhaps align the right border of the left column with the left of the the building in the cityscape above it. I like the idea for filtering the portfolio items, the transition is a bit crazy though, I'd suggest just a linear fade-out-in. Services page, again, the content is too wide and negatively affects readability, could also benefit from some paragraphing! Just a couple of smaller points, with smooth anchor transitions, I like to have the ability to cancel the movement if the scroll wheel is moved. And, your resume (PDF's aren't generally very appealling) has 2 headings "what we use...". And, the tabs you have for on the services page, it waits for the fade-in animation to finish before registering clicks to go to a different tab, and bugs out if you click on multiple ones before it finishes the animation. Most of the above you probably won't need to worry about too much, it's a fab design all round, just feeling rather critical right now!

Ah well, guess my post might be useful to someone.

Image optimisation from a technical aspect is just about implementing the graphics on your website as efficient as possible, with minimal bandwidth and web space factors. For smaller sites, you don't have to be too strict, but it doesn't hurt to give it a bit of thought, it's just part of a well executed web development process. For high traffic websites, you can put your images on an external host so as not to over work your website's server, extra costs of course incur here. Of course it's important, not quite as important as it was say, 10 years ago, but its essential to be efficient with your graphics to ensure fast page load times. If you're working with many large photos, you want to use the right image format and the right compression settings. If you're working with many small non-repeating images, like icons, then consider making use of the sprite technique. There's quite a lot of techniques and methods regarding "image optimisation" and can't be covered in a single post. Also, not a very relevant category for this question.

Apparently the maximum fine is £500,000. What do they do when they don't pay up?

What would be a much better solution is to have a notification forcibly handled by the browser. A few browsers would need to be updated, instead of hundreds of thousands of websites and wasted work-hours. Nothing I've heard justifies the need to verify cookies.

Nice domain name Love the concept, with the print related elements in various places. Can't really fault it, not getting any noticable FOUCs.

Corporate control and the internet will never mix.

Yeah I understand what you're saying about the feel you get from the site, however, most of our clan members will probably be invited externally or word of mouth. I plan to implement a theme switcher for members only, simple operation with the CMS I'm using. The second theme will feature a few poweruser features and a different, more complex layout. I thought I'd like to break the chain with a fresh design instead of the common dark/complex layout you usually see. Will see how it goes, I'll perhaps look into targeting first time visitors and having a call to action to register. We had actually planned, if we get a name for ourselves, to open a store selling various things.

You still need to put the gallery_container div inside your contact_wrapper <div class="contact_wrapper"> <div id="gallery_container"> stuff </div> </div><!--end of contact_wrapper--> margin:0 auto is margin-left:auto; margin-right:auto; and is the best way to center block elements.

Quick design alterations I would make: • Top right nav <a> color -> #FFF • "Desperate Houses [this text]" colour -> lighter yellow. • The "Read more +" buttons are slightly odd, shading on the top is confusing. Actually won't list them, just take a look at your contrast in general. Your colour scheme is friendly and distinctive, just not implemented very well. Also http://desperatehouses.co.uk/news/category/child-care - your heading id has crazy characters in it, so it isn't being selected, take a look at the template for that one, could be char enc. Just a tiny (tiny) point, the hover state for the top right navigation is on the <li>, instead of the <a>, and your <li> is bigger than the <a>, leaves a deadzone of about 6px under the links.

You'd be better not using positioning for this. CSS: gallery_holder { width: 500px; background-color: #FCF; margin:0 auto 0 auto; } .clear { clear:both; } Changes to markup: Put gallery_holder inside contact_wrapper Put a <div class=clear"></div> just before your gallery_holder closes. That should do it.

I think the design is sound (better than it sounds), does what it's supposed to and relatively elegantly, it establishes your identity as a designer quite well. I'll throw out a quote which I can't quite remember the origin, "Good design is one that can't be seen".

Right great, The initial idea was to break from the dark, cluttered design trend in gaming clan websites. For the above design, I'm going to animate the 3 columns, so each will have a summary/cutdown version of what is in each column, and you can click on it to expand it and view the full content. Easy enough to implement that sort of thing. I'll maybe try and work another colour into the colour scheme to liven it up a bit. Thanks for the feedback

UX is (/should be) an integral part of your average web designer's job. I personally have never trusted dedicated UX consultants, multiple reasons.