hodephdesign

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.

no you're not, you're in India. Stop lying about your location.

The amount of emails, phone calls and texts that say this:
is amazing

I guess it depends on the client, if you've discussed it with them and how much you care about SEO. I'd make it subtle if you were to include it, at any rate. If you plan on doing it for all your sites it's probably worth mentioning it in early correspondence or in the contract.

I don't really think you need any pointers on the design, it's absolutely brilliant. It's clean, it's simple and it's well laid out. The only thing I'd say about the design is that the logo doesn't really do it for me, but it's not the worst I've seen (by a long stretch) and will work for now. Oh and also I'd make the site fill the width of the screen completely. Also the bottom border on the header seems a little redundant!
 
As for the coding, I would make a few recommendations. Firstly, it seems like the animations are pretty slow; are you using .animate() for these? It might be worth looking into CSS transitions if you can as these are hardware accelerated (or so I'm told, they certainly work a lot better). Never come across jFlow before, you might want to look into NivoSlider or bxSlider as replacements to get the functionality you want. I think it would be better to add some change to the cursor on hover with the slider (maybe have cursor:pointer on the left and right arrows).
 
I'm looking forward to seeing the rest of it as it comes along. So far much better than 80% of the sites "professional web designers/developers" seem to throw up on here for criticism. Great job.

Hi, I'm basically a self taught hobbyist designer who found himself in the retouching business and took on the challenge of designing and developing my own website to bring in new business. (Challenge accepted.)
 
I've been teaching myself development as I go, basically I'll hit a problem and scour the internet for ways around it while tweaking and testing to get it working so don't be expecting clean and organised coding or even the best practices, if anything sticks out though I'd obviously love to hear where I'm going wrong
 
So far this is just the homepage: http://leebuckle.co.uk/newsite/test/index.html'>http://leebuckle.co.uk/newsite/test/index.html
 
 
Also the full site doesn't work yet, this is just the home page and the idea is that it's pretty simple and clean not to take away from the subject which will be the retouching work or maybe design at some point when I've got more to show.
 
 
 
 
Some of my own critiques which I've noted and not too sure on:
 
Might move the baseline of all the top links down a bit, it was originally all centered vertically like this: http://leebuckle.co.uk and when I changed it I went with the baseline of the logo.
 
Have the slider fade or at least not rewind after the last one (will be worse when there's more slides), I'm just finding it tricky to implement that though as I'm no jquery whiz and the jflow plugin doesn't have simple options.
 
Not too sure about the contact icons at the top right, bit too bulky and takes away from the elegance maybe?
 
Lastly adding maybe a bit more info for each slide such as a bit more detail on techniques or a 'View More' link to view to the portfolio or Services.
 
Thanks,
Lee

Also when they try and grab you as your leaving their page. GIVE UP ALREADY!

Stupid stock imagery that depict people much happier and more successful than myself.

Brightonmike I'm loving the current tagline on your site:
 
 
Haha oops!

I think it would be better to lock down the design in Photoshop before going further with production, no? The typography could use some work. There's so much going on with the different font colors, word spacing and line spacing. Everything is italics. Drop shadows and outlines. Things need to be more consistent from a visual standpoint.
 
And I've got a white background on the homepage.

Hey guys, just launched this for a client, would love to know your thoughts (and to see if you can break it!).
 
Images need changing on the contact and about page, so disregard them.
 
www.eleanorcrook.com

Looks like jQuery, maybe something like this: jQuery Waypoints

I'm building a site that explodes whenever it's viewed in IE8 and less as well as XP machines.
It's been a long task and it's cost me a fortune in C4 but it'll be worth it, totally!
 
Apart from that i've been winding up Indian outsourcers on Skype.

Looks nice! I think it could do with a touch more colour- maybe consider making the grey bar at the top the same red colour as the logo, and maybe on the slideshow at the bottom.
 
I'd personally keep the square theme going for the thumbnails next to the image at the top, just to keep consistent...

Essentially: not a real problem. You should be previewing your designs in a browser anyway, because Dreamweaver isn't accurate.

I'm just getting "IT IS" on Chrome 18 on Win7...
 
EDIT: it just decided to show up...

Overall design looks pretty good!
 
I seem to be saying this a lot, but you've got a lot of fonts going on, looks a bit messy.
 
I don't think that blog-style format would work for the guide page, I think it would be hard to navigate and order. I'm assuming the guide will be able to be sorted by different fields?

Agree. I think it might be nice to have the image of the cows fade into the grey background...

If someone wants to do that then I don't care. I just don't think they're qualified to be calling themselves "designers" or "developers" when their grasp of either area is so limited they might as well cut off their own arms.

Dont you hate it when you get an email from a client (or a phone call) and something on the website isn't working properly, or looks different. You have a look on your side and everything is ok (because we always update our browsers)
 
Then you try and get some info from them about what browser they use and they say "Yahoo" because that's their home page
 
Well I stumbled across this today and thought I would share it because it helped me.
 
Now you only need to send them this link and they only need to fill in the form with your email address.
 
And you will get the info that you need

Im jumping in here after just skipping pages of content, so sorry for doing that, but some times I think people on this site are a bit elitist, no one owns the internet by the way, competition is good because it means an expanding industry.
 
My problem is there is no real pricing structures laid out. no industry standard fee's, and with companies like 1&1 offering websites for FREE, i mean come on, its not the new designers you want to worry about, its these bigger companies trying to find ways to cut out the web guy altogether.
 
I mean hell, there is templates at the top of this forum advertised for £3 quid, the problem is this makes it very difficult for designers to charge a correct fee, without some one else guzumping you massively.
 
We all got to eat, but the WWW standards should work harder at supporting the industry when it comes to us dealing with clients and having set standards to work to as guidelines.
 
Im constantly having to educate my clients, otherwise they think every job takes seconds and they dont want to pay me for my time, like Im sat there twiddling my thumbs trying to rip them off.
 
Going back to the original subject, its not fair to put any negativity on to young people trying to make a career move, the world is pretty messed up right now, its hard for anyone to make the right choice now, I mean ****, now we are being told dont go to uni, its not worth the fee's, if this is true, then how are young people supposed to become a web designer.
 
Nothing is easy for anyone, thats life I suppose, so live and let live.
 
T

Oh, FFS.

If you've got the site setup in Google Webmaster Tools, there's an option under Crawler Access for removing pages from the index.
 
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1663419

yeeeeah, bring it on lol
 
some say I'm mad, but really I'm just insane

Hello
 
Don't get my opinion wrong (it's for help purpose), but the site is a disaster:
 


 
First of all the code, every single element is styled individually, it's like a huge unreadable wall of text
Content isn't centered, on my screen it's moved more to the right side
Color pick overall on the site (blue text looks bad)
Menu is just, well starting of badly rendered png image of whole menu bar, you can do better looking menu using css only much easier, not to mention links that doesn't even react on hover, have not necessary underline
Footer's font is too small

 
The only thing that i find quite ok is the logo (Altho it would look better with serif font)
 
To sum up, you're doing it wrong. Start with some good lecture, like Eric Meyers CSS, if you need more titles just ask.