bumfluff

Courtesy of Youtube...

If potential customers are put off by your price, there's one of two reasons.. either your prices are too high or (and I'm guessing this is the real reason) your prices are too high for the customers you're attracting. So you can either lower your prices, or maybe look into how you're marketing yourself. How do you promote yourself? How can you better target yourself towards the kind of customers you want (ie, ones that will pay what you feel is reasonable)? Think about who your target market is, then think about how you can best advertise yourself to them. Analyse why your current approach is attracting the wrong market, see what you could change. If it's any consolation though, I think there are a lot of 'tyre-kickers' when it comes to design. There's not much public awareness about design as a profession, what it is and what benefits it can bring. People hear about it, so they see how much it'll cost, but they often think the cost is too high because they're unclear as to how it will benefit their business - professional design is seen as a cost, where it's actually an investment. Unfortunately, there's a lot of cowboys who call themselves designers because they have a hooky version of photoshop and know how to add bevels and reflections to stuff. When that sort of thing is passed off as design everyday (and is encouraged by sites like elance or logoworks), it gives designers a bad name. Businesses don't see a return because they've received crap work - trouble is, Joe Public, or Joe Business Owner) can't tell the difference between good and bad work. To be fair, they shouldn't have to - if you go to someone calling themselves a professional, you'd expect professional work.. Anyway, rant over There's a good resource here about the benefits. It's good to have hard facts and figures when dealing with figures. It generally carries more weight than "it'll make you look good" or whatever. Also, from your post, it sounds like you have quite a passive approach to marketing yourself. The customer finds you somehow and asks for a quote, at which point you give them a quote and that's it. Perhaps it'd be better to try and get more face-to-face meetings. That way you can actually explain costs and benefits to them rather than just giving a figure and keeping your fingers crossed.

Eh, so you did.. sorry, woke up late and only had half a coffee when I wrote that

You could try GIMPShop.. it's basically The GIMP but reworked to be more like Photoshop.

Might be best to post a link or the code or something. Bit hard to say without seeing it, although I do remember having similar problems. It was a long time ago, but if I remember right, it was caused by padding and margins and stuff. 'Course, it could be something totally different in your case

For some reasn, that totally didn't work for me I tried in Firefox, the box wasn't movable.. so I tried in IE and got text telling me to get Firefox.. Mind you, Firefox had just updated about 20 minutes before I tried it, maybe that had something to do with it?

Nope. I don't think it's good for either the designers or the client. All but a few of the designers will end up having done work without any kind of pay. I've noticed that the payment for winners in contests is usually well below market rates, too. I also think the client isn't getting what's best for them either.. Generally, you don't get experienced designers working on spec. More info in the sig link

Like this?

Thing is with a simple design is that because there's less going on, what's there has to be pretty much perfect. Simple is surprisingly difficult.. The motorhome pic is totally unbalancing things here. The right-align with the centre of the content area isn't working on its own, it needs some other relationship with the other elements. You could resize it so it has the same height as the logo, but I'd look at choosing another image instead. This one looks out of place.. it's very functional but no more than that. Don't just think of the product, think of what it conveys... freedom, new horizons, etc etc.. that's what customers are buying into. Also, there's something odd about that pic.. it looks like a 3D render or a model or something. That's kinda distracting (although maybe not so noticeable once there's more content). The logo... sucks I noticed it's slightly different in this one compared to the first post.. have they not got it finalised? Maybe you could talk them into getting it redone.. it's very prominent on the site and kinda sets the tone of everything else. It does look amateurish though, and I think it'll completely kill any minimalist site design. The logo and the image are too close to the edges. The edges don't align with anything.. I'd shift everything in from the edges (images, text etc) in at least 15-20px and align them

That last one is a bit of a mess Any 'fresh' feel from the grass image is getting totally lost with the busyness of the transparencies. The angled text is hard to read, along with some of the text on the badges. I'd question the need for the badges and the background text. People looking for someone to build their website are generally not interested in whether you know CSS, XHTML, Dreamweaver or whatever - they just want a good website. If they ARE looking for one of those in particular, they're likely to do a search for those terms, but text in graphic form isn't going to do anything for your search results anyway. Put it in your body text instead and it'll clear up your header.

All 3 were good.. the last was made by a different company, and everyone was expecting it to be rubbish, but it was pretty good in the end. There was one level on there (The Cradle) that was set in an old lunatic asylum, and I swear that was the creepiest part of any game I've ever played I haven't played WoW at all. I'm a bit afraid I'll never leave the house if I try it.. I do occasionally play Guild Wars, though. No monthly fees, which is a bonus.. actually, I might have a blast at that over the weekend.

Simplicity is good, but it's definitely missing something. I guess it looks simple in a "can't be arsed" kinda way (not saying that's how it came about), 'cos you've drawn stuff on the computer rather than hand drawing and scanning.

Did you ever play the Thief games? I loved those.. lots of skeery moments playing late at night with the lights off..

'lo Neil

faux columns - run a repeating background image down the left that fakes the vertical lines. How about if you get rid of 'navlist li' and use 'navlist li a' to make the border as well? Something like: #navlist li a { text-align: center; display: block; width: 100%; padding: .3em; color: #FFFFFF; text-decoration: none; background: #3d736b; border: solid .25em #FFFFFF; margin-top: 0.7em; }

Well, looking at the code above, the container would be the wrapper, right? The container background is set to black, which is the same as the left column, while the right column's background is white. The difference would only show if the right column is the shorter one, leaving everything under the right column as black ('cos it'd be showing the container background). By setting the container background as white as well, you wouldn't see where the right column stopped. Or you could just leave the right column background as blank, so it'd just use the container background colour directly

PHP or ASP. Tutorial Getting the request on the website is a bit trickier. There's another thread about that

W3C Tutorial

Been finding time for some late night Insurgency sessions lately..

Could you not just set the background to white, same as the shorter column?

great - IF the person returns after wading through your hugeass images

That's ok, don't mention it. Whatever it was

It's an improvement on the previous ones, definitely. Like RobH says, I'd ditch the square 'i' icons.. it's all product information, so marking it as such is redundant. Also agree about stating clearly what Journese is and what it does. The header gives a rough idea, but there needs to be more information that states simply what it does. Make it easy for potential customers to evaluate. Some products are suited to a more circumspect approach, but I'm guessing that if anyone comes across your site, they've done a fairly specific search.. at that point, don't beat around the bush - convince them that this is what they've been looking for. I kinda see the idea behind the road image, but it's not quite working in it's current form. It's too colourful a background for your logo. Maybe you can use the road idea, but stylise it.. perhaps use elements like the road markings throughout your site without making the idea so obvious? You may even want to think about using the logo in a plain colour format. The chrome effect looks a bit amateurish (the idea, rather than the execution) and makes the site look a bit dated. Having it in one colour would add a bit of class, I think (if the rest of the design holds up as well). The information layout is a huge improvement. It's now clear what the different elements are for. That's a big step in the right direction. I'd rethink some of the details, though, like the colours - what colours would you associate with couriers or courier software? The blue does tend to suggest some sort of IT firm, but that's probably a bit vague because you're not offering general IT services. Also need to look at the alignments of various bits and pieces, mainly how text sits in the menu and headings. They should really be vertically centred. I think the menu background is a little large. Last point - The subheadings are a very similar colour to the links, and the menu links are the same colour as the column headings. I'd change these so colour is used in a way that's consistent with meaning. All sounds negative, but I do want to say again that I think it's really starting to get somewhere in comparison to the others.. well done

Depending on who you listen to, UK broadband use is around 90% of net users. Depending on who a particular website is targetted towards, it may still be worth developing with dial-up in mind.

With respect, I'm not sure that's really design so much as one possible approach to making a website. Whether it's an approach that's appropriate for a particular client is another matter. To me, design is about coming up with something that suits the particular job. About 90% of it is research into competitors, target markets and so on, not just making it look 'nice'.