bumfluff

centred site - pinned at the top of the forum section Not sure what you meant by 'spry navigation bars'..

*waves*

'lo there, cy

looks like it's been designed more for yourself than for potential clients :/

The license would be for her company's use.Seeing as you don't work for that company, and it's not for the benefit of that company in any way, it'd still be a no-no. You could look into open-source alternatives. There's a photo editing app called The GIMP, I'm pretty sure that's free even for commercial use. It's a little unintuitive, but there's a variant which aims to be closer to Photoshop in terms of interface etc, called GIMPShop. There's open source or shareware alternatives for most things that you'll need.

It's pretty easy to use, yeah. It doesn't take long at all to learn the basics, and if I remember right, the help files are pretty good. The code it comes out with isn't the best, but I don't think that'd be a problem if you're a beginner. It (or any other WYSIWYG editor) can't beat hand coding, but it's a useful first step.

Those would more than likely be educational licenses - not for commercial purposes. Probably nobody would find out, but apart from the ethical eaving the ethical argument out of it, the school could get into trouble over using the software commercially. Maybe nobody would ever find out, but I guess you have to think about what position it'd put you in if it did happen.

Heya Photoshop is just for pictures. Everything will be saved as a picture, including text, so you can't create a whole website with it (although you can obviously use it to make any pics on the site). You can make a simple website with just a text editor (something like Notepad on Windows). You'd need to learn a markup language called HTML or XHTML, which can be typed into the text editor and saved. If you don't like the text editor idea, there are other programs you can use, like Dreamweaver. These make it a lot easier to build a site, because it works more like a word processor (you just drop in pictures and text etc). They're called WYSIWYG HTML editors (so you can do a search for them.. there's even a few free ones).

It might be easier, but chances are you won't get much in the way of portfolio-quality work. Without experience, you'll have to compete on price. Clients that source a designer based purely on price are generally not too clued up on what design is about and what it can do for their business. That's not conducive to producing quality work, because a) you don't have the same level of commitment to them, the expected standard isn't as high and c) without experience or a portfolio, it'll be pretty hard for you to justify saying no when they ask you to stuff their design full of reflections, comic sans and bevels. You'd also be going into business with no experience of business. Have you thought about contracts, insurance, liability, doing your taxes, paying for software etc? If it's portfolio work you're after, you'd be better off doing 'imaginary' projects. Set yourself a brief (or ask your teacher to), and work to it. It's a better opportunity to show what you can do, and if you're a school leaver, a future employer won't hold it against you if the work isn't 'real', as long as it's good and shows what you're capable of.

Polished, but yeah.. gotta agree about it looking very generic. Apart from the image, it could be a site for anything.. an IT company, organic foods, whatever. In terms of design, it doesn't have anything in the way of a unique character. That's quite a disadvantage because it means you can't really build any kind of brand recognition around it. I read in your last post that you're working on the logo.. that seems the wrong way to go about it. Surely the logo should come first? The process of designing the logo would bring you most of the way to establishing the appropriate overall style/feel for the rest of your marketing stuff, including the website.

I think the choice has to be out of 1 or 3, the others don't really translate well as black & white. If it's going to appear on a white background, I'd go for the orange.. it's much clearer than the green.

That top left puzzle piece... how come it doesn't fit with the others? I mean, the sticky out bit and the cut-out bit, they don't match the other pieces.. was there reason for that?

I did a HND in graphic design some years back. The college sessions were generally from 9-4, but a lot of the time I'd only leave between 6 and 8 due to finishing things off. Depending on the college you go with, they may let you do a lot of the work at home, but I'm not sure that'd make much difference - the work still has to be done, wherever you do it from, although you may save a bit of travel time by doing it from home.

uh, well spotted.. fixed now cheers for the welcomes

+1 The big bright green areas are too overpowering. Overall layout is kinda bloggy and generic, which probably isn't that good an idea for a company that does design, because it doesn't stand out at all.. if I were a customer, I'd be looking for a bit more originality. Same with the reflected logo - that's kind've a passing faddy thing which is going to make the site look dated pretty quickly.

The site sorta looks ok in that it has a "finished" kind of look, but I don't see much in the way of concept there. The smoke is quite eyecatching, but doesn't really say anything in particular to me - it seems to have been added for the sake of it rather than any design-led reason. You also have some grunge brushes in the same colour next to it, which I don't think work. Because they're in the same green colour, it looks like they're part of the same object, but that makes the contrast in style look wrong - the brushes are quite rough, the smoke has a smooth/blended look. On a technical level, there's nothing really wrong with it (except some empty tags when I looked at it, but I figure it might be unfinished). SEO-wise, you could do more with it (h1, alt tags..), but that's relatively easy. To me, the design is the bit that needs the most work. It looks better than a lot of other sites I've seen, but it doesn't really stand out right now. That may or may not be a priority.. I guess it depends on the type of work you'd be looking to get into. If it's development and backend programmy type stuff that you want to do, design probably isn't a priority, but if you're looking to get into the creative side of design, I'd definitely work on the concept.

If both CSS files are being called, it'll use the last style specified for the selector. Are the two CSS files simply alternative stylesheets for the same html page?

Hi all. <--n00b. *waves*