CheckeredMichael Design

Thanks for everything you guys have said, I appreciate every comment made and will take it all in. Hopefully I can take a step back for a while to help myself create something amazing.

Thanks for all your feedback, I shall be trying really hard to redesign and really think about what is working and what isn't and I will let you guys know when I have finished it so you can give me more feedback. I appreciate all of your comments and will keep all of them in mind.

It's not a problem at all, and don't feel bad about letting me know what you think as I can sometimes go over board when it comes to designing certain aspects of websites. I have only had a couple of design clients and none of them have seen my website before they wanted one for themselves. So I haven't had any come through my site and email me and this is why I am asking for feedback. I've been losing a lot in confidence in myself over the past couple of years since I've not been able to land any trainee jobs and the one job I did land, they said I need more experience and they had to let me go until I gathered the experience needed. So I just need to pick up and get myself back on top form. Cheers for your comments and if you have anything else spring to mind then feel free to let me know.

Hey guys I have created myself a new website and would like some feedback. As always you can be as brutal as you want as long as all comments are constructive. http://freelancewebdesign.me

Just done a Google search and found this, hopefully it can help you... http://www.sitepoint.com/code-html-email-newsletters/

Check out http://w3schools.com to learn HTML, CSS, PHP and MYSQL which are the key elements to creating an interactive website. You could also check http://tutorialized.com/ for some good tutorials. As for the game aspect you will need either Flash (which costs a lot of money) or you could try and learn to create the games with HTML5 and Javascript (which you can learn about with w3schools). Hope this helps dude.

Works perfectly fine in Safari for me. What version of Safari are you using?

Just give any divs or classes which contains any text a fixed width suitable for your website and have the height set to auto so it will flow up and down as text gets added/removed.

There is also a Sitemap generator you can use http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ which automatically creates your sitemap and has a couple of cool features to help you have a bit of control over your sitemap. If your using some sort of CMS or Blog system then there are always plugins which will automatically do all the work for you, you just have to search for them.

You could probably advertise on the front page that you accept Paypal, Google Checkout, and/or Credit cards etc. When people first go on your website and they can't see types of payment methods right from the start then they will get scared and leave because they don't know right from the start what they can and can't use to pay for their goods. I'm in the same boat as you where I managed to build up lots of views but absolutely no customers. My shopping site has been hacked and someone has bought something on my website, but it turned out they hacked someone's Paypal and tried to buy an iPad from my site which I was not happy about (luckily I didn't send it out) and so I gave up on trying to advertise my store. Check it out if you want, maybe you'll get some ideas... http://technic-store.co.uk

I quite like the fact I have simplescript so I can just install different things, test it out and if it doesn't fit my needs just uninstall. This is what I have so far with a wordpress engine... http://testingthewebcom.ipage.com/wordpress

Yeah I did think it was a bit OTT. I've been trying to strip it down as much as possible to get it to how I want, but now it's missing quite a lot of functionality which would be nice to have kept which is a bit annoying although I think I could probably get it back with a bit of self coding. Cheers for that, I'll give it a go. Downloading it to see what it's like. Just want to add that this is what the mock site looks like so far http://testingthewebcom.ipage.com/chacha

I have fairly basic knowledge of PHP, he wants an online payment. Basically he wants people to sign up, order some wedding bits e.g. chair covers, saches, table runners, etc and then book the date of their wedding so that they can ship it on the day and the pick the items up the day after. I'm thinking maybe I could just have an ecommerce system (currently trying out Zen Cart) where they will order the bits and choose a date, he also wants to let people know if that date is available for them. The trouble I find with ecommerce systems is that their too store like for what I want so I'm trying to get the website to look nothing like an online store and more like a normal website just like the shoot it yourself website. I hope I'm making sense with all of this lol.

Thanks for the reply. It does look amazing, and I know I won't be able to get it THAT good, but my client just cares about the form process on that one page at the minute. The rest of it will be done over time I know he wants a retro kind of website which would look nice. Do you recommend any plugins which will allow me to get a similar form?

You can usually get hosting pretty cheap. Check out one.com you can get your first year of hosting for free. You will need to pay about £10 for the domain registration, but if you use topcashback you can get £10 back so it is then free for the first year and you pay about £20 a year after. The problem with this site is you have to host all your domains separately so if you have loads of sites waiting to be hosted then this could be expensive but for one domain it is pretty cheap. If you have many websites which you want to host on one hosting package then you could use ipage which allows you to host as many domains as you like on one package for about £24 a year. If you would like a free hosting account you could try 110mbwhich offers a pretty good free package. The trouble with free packages is that they don't offer you any extras, so if you would like lots of databases, free ad coupons etc then you should look into paid. I hope this helps and good luck.