Mody

Oh and MolotovRuss, first of all thank you. I was hoping to make it small enough to not require any scrolling. But I too think it may need more space. The only add on I was planning is a style changer, but I may add something there. We'll see. Thanks again.

Thank you all for your replies and feedback. I am only asking for which design you prefer. I did mention that ''normal linkes'' don't work, but I didn't make it clear. I'm using Mootools, but all the JS effects I use are unobtrusive. You can see that the menu links to different pages, but they are not there. I have to finish the design and copy before getting to those. Talking about copy, this is dummy content. I just dont like to use Lorem, so I just put something there. Thanks for the feedback anyway. Please keep them coming guys. Keep in mind that the content is dummy content and that the normal pages, for people with JS off, are not uploaded yet. I just need to know which design I should use. Thanks!

Thanks DN. I appreciate your feedback. Please keep them coming guys.

Thanks Kip, I really appreciate it. They ARE pretty similar, but the background image of the content area is a little different. The first uses a radial gradient that blends in with the body image on both sides while the second uses a linear background that blends with the body only on the right side. I'm not sure which one looks better.

Hello everybody! I hope you are doing great. I haven't been active here in around 2 months. Had exams and then went travelling. In April I think I asked for your opinions on my first try for a portfolio site, at fiob[io.com). I didn't work more on that one after the reviews here and didn't use it. Now I have something new and I'd really appreciate any feedback. I have two versions. The first is found at [obil)ido*com and the second at [obi)lido*com/aj2.html The code is probably too messy and it's not finished at all (logo is a place holder, normal links don't exist, etc). But I'd really appreciate your opinions on which background do you prefer and if the type is fine. I'll also be adding a style changer with several options later. Thanks in advance. I hope to hear from you soon.

Darn it, why didn't you do it two months ago? This is an awesome tutorial for beginners. Very clever and interesting. Good luck!

No, though I became good friends with a girl to date her best friend. Have you ever worked in a war zone? ( I worked as a translator with the U.S. troops in Iraq for 8 months).

I'm new this, but it already happened to me. And Lady Headcoat is probably right. In the worst case, getting some rest makes you actually think about how you can approach things and correct what you think is wrong. Oh and don't, just don't throw the headcoat out of the window. That would be disastrous.

Thanks. I got it created with Mootools using the slide function. Mootools has good documentation on their site and it is not that complicated. Thank you. I appreciate your review and opinion. Thank you very much for the very helpful review and advice. I will be working on it and hopefully it will look acceptable even before your turn your monitor's brightness up. Your points are valid and extremely helpful, I really appreciate you spending the time to give such a detailed and to the point review. I think I will redesign it soon, and I will try my best to address your points. Thank you, thank you again. I appreciate your review. Almost everybody thinks it is too dark so Ill make sure to redesign with this in mind. Thank you.

Thank you very much Paul. I will definitely keep your recommendations in mind and try my best to make it better.

Thank you Aaron. Your site is wonderful and I am honored to receive a positive review from you. The usability issue is something I noticed. This needs to be done with JS. Honestly I am still learning and I am not sure how to do it, so I thought I should leave it for later. Search engines will have no problem with the site. I am using unobtrusive AJAX and each menu item has its own normal page, not everything is on one HTML page. Again, thank you Aaron. I appreciate it. Everybody else, please keep them coming.

Hi Londonia home of the Big Ben. Thank you very much. I am not fond of left-aligned sites, especially now that many people use large screens. However, I will definitely try to address what you pointed what and see how I can ''fix'' it without resorting to left-aligning. Thanks again.

That someone would be me. Welcome to the forum James and thanks a lot for helping.

Thank you all for the reviews and advice. I really appreciate it. It seems like pretty much everybody agrees that it is too dark, so I will have to make new themes with brighter colors. Please keep this coming. It is immensely helpful to me. Let me know if you have any suggestion or if you do not like anything in the site. Thanks again!

Thanks Kip. I love dark colors, but when making the themes I sometimes felt they're too dark as well. I should probably make a reasonably brighter theme and make it the default. Thanks again.

Hi. I agree with subhajit and notbanksy, you should remove Comic Sans from your design. Also, your colors are a little bit boring. Typical old websites' color scheme of blue and red. I think playing with colors would make a huge difference. You can find inspiration on websites like Kuler.adobe.com and colourlovers.com. Overall, good job!

Thanks ElanMan. That does help. Your first point made me think. I have a connection speed of 2200 kbps and the sliding speed is good for me. Not too fast, but it does not take ages to load either. Does it load too fast for you? Is it because of a faster connection? The second point is definitely on my to-do list. I am planning on making small images instead of numbers. ''it might be best to have an individual page for each link/navigation instaed of a refresh.'' Did you mean a page refresh instead of using JS? I made everything unobtrusive for those who prefer navigating with JS disabled. Thanks again!

I think it looks awesome! And I agree with you about rounded corners. I think it looks good as it is. The only thing I would do is increasing the padding of the content area. The text needs a little bit more space in my opinion. Good luck!

Hi everybody, I hope you are doing great. After two months of learning, I know enough to produce something I think is acceptable. The content is a dummy content and I still have many things to do ''adding pages, filling out keywords and titles, etc.'' The site is found here http://tinyurl.com/5jo2ug Here are a few things I'd be really grateful if you can address: 1) The site has a style changer ''click the numbers to the right''. Which theme do you think I should use as default? 2) IE7 messes up the AJAX functionality when transparent PNGs are used. You can test that here. Im currently using conditional comments to give backgrounds CSS colors instead of PNG backgrounds. What do you think I should do: A- Keep it this way. Make IE7 display CSS colors instead of transparent PNGs? B- Make IE7 display transparent PNGs and leave the AJAX effect messed up? C- Remove the JS effects for IE7? Thank you in advance. Any advice or help is really appreciated.

Hi Ciaee! Your website is absolutely impressive for a first timer. I hope my website receives favorable reviews like yours when I launch it. The colors of the website are fine. You only need to change the color of the text to add more contrast. Dark is slightly more creative, and in my opinion it looks good. Regarding your layout, divs are extremely easy to grab. I am a new comer to web development too and I think it took me two days to understand how divs and their positioning work. It is pretty easy really. Take care and best of luck with the site.

Thanks for sharing ElanMan. And nice avator. You're very welcome and thanks again. I tried the same steps I used in Flash and got the same result with a file size of 50KB! Huge difference, and that without even tweaking settings and with too many unnecessary layers (I was trying the lighting effects you recommended). I can probably get it down to around 30-40 KB without losing quality, and that is good enough for me. I really have to start using Photoshop more, but Im always put off by the difference of what I see in Photoshop and the final product it produces that Ive always encountered when working in it. For example this background looked horrible when I was making it, but I decided to try saving it anyway and the result was very different from what I saw in PS. I find that pretty annoying. Is it just me or do you guys notice the same? I am not sure when I will be trying the method Eris suggested, I decided to keep it for later. I will let you know when I try it though.

I think he used something similar to this one: http://gmarwaha.com/blog/?cat=8. There is also a Mootools version that does the same thing. You can find it here. I hope this helps.

Thanks Subhajit, I will check it out. I do not think this would validate but it can be useful since I am having an extra line of code for IE6 anyway.

It IS cool! This is very interesting, thanks for sharing. I am already using conditional comments (using an AJAX effect that (un)suprisingly get messed up in IE7 when I use a transparent PNG anywhere in the page). I will try it out today. Thanks again.

Hi There! Your site is beautiful, very nice work buddy. I use Flash more than anything else for images (it's the first program I started learning) and after posting here I found out an easy way to do something like your background. I got my pattern, broke it apart, picked it up with eyedropper tool and created a rectangle with the repeated pattern as the ''color''. Then I created another layer above the pattern layer and used a radial gradient with three swatches, played with the Alpha transparency and done. I got a good image that blends nicely into the background. Only other thing I did was playing with the gradient direction. However while your background weighs around 60 KB, mine could not weigh less than 200 no matter how hard I tried to optimize, and it is significantly smaller in dimensions. I uploaded it at http://img2.freeimagehosting.net/image.php?bded57fb78.jpg. It looks a bit pixelated and outdated there (happened after uploading), but you can have a good idea from it. I also tried to do something very similar to yours just to see if that has anything to do with the filesize (used the same colors and a similar pattern), and the best result weighed 100 KB. Still too much. I will have to try Photoshop. Thank you VERY MUCH for helping and giving instructions. I really appreciate it. I have also been following PSDTuts, but I've been focusing on XHTML, CSS, and JS during the last two months or so and I did not get time to play with Photoshop. Take care and good luck with the site!