Fran Haselden

Because they're shiny.
 
 
In fairness, Apple laptops are good. They're great, they work well, they give excellent viewing on the screen. But... there isn't any point unless you have the 20% extra lying around. I have had a MacBook and an iMac, and they're very good machines... but they're not better for the price.

Ha! This is great. I'm glad they took my advice to go back to the drawing board, perhaps a little further than I expected though?
 
If you say his name three times does he appear? Adam Godsall, Adam Godsall are you there Adam Godsall?

"An SEO expert walks into a bar, bars, beer garden, hangout, lounge, night club, mini bar, bar stool, tavern, pub, beer, wine, whiskey..."

"An SEO expert walks into a bar, bars, beer garden, hangout, lounge, night club, mini bar, bar stool, tavern, pub, beer, wine, whiskey..."

For someone who is selling professional web design and graphic design, you seem to have little ability in both.. graphic design and web design.
 
For a start, your style is entirely confused. You've got a grungy logo with grungy style text, followed by a sleek square mono-colour menu. Then you've got a colourful stitched feature panel. All of this screams back to the drawing board. Entirely. Start again.
 
Find your style, create your mockups based on this style. Don't just pull in cool things from here and there, consider how they fit in with your design. More whitespace, less words, less gimmicks, more thought.

I like the layout but I think it is a little squeezed in, could possibly expand it out a little to give a bit more space between all the content areas.
 
Also in some places the padding is tight, for example on the footer, and could be increased. It feels a little squished together.
 
Why is the testimonial an image? Should be text.
 
Also, your About Me has several spelling mistake and grammatical errors.
 
 
I'm confused as on your homepage you are a 'we' and on your about you are 'me'. Should keep it in-line across the site.
 
To be honest, I think you should cut the text on your site in half. Reduce everything to half the word count. It's unnecessary and usability tests show time and time again that people simply don't read much text. An example of one section I've cut down:
 
You could reduce this:
 
To this:
 
Essentially the above, why are you telling people that you'll offer them high quality work to the deadline? It's already expected of you that you'll offer to the deadline, you shouldn't need to state it. The quality of the images on the site shows that your work is high quality.
 
Go through the site and consider where stuff is stating the obvious and where it is actually useful for SEO purposes. People are unlikely to read the text, especially as the font size is pretty small, they want to see the photographs you take and that is what will sell. The rest if just SEO fodder.
 
Also now I want prawns.

I have to say I love Android, have you considered the S3, or if your budget is lower the S2? (Still a fantastic phone.) As much as I can see the iPhone is a good phone, it is still behind in many ways. I also don't really see the point of the iPhone 5, I don't think it brought enough to the table. I can see why Apple is slowly losing out.

For someone who is selling professional web design and graphic design, you seem to have little ability in both.. graphic design and web design.
 
For a start, your style is entirely confused. You've got a grungy logo with grungy style text, followed by a sleek square mono-colour menu. Then you've got a colourful stitched feature panel. All of this screams back to the drawing board. Entirely. Start again.
 
Find your style, create your mockups based on this style. Don't just pull in cool things from here and there, consider how they fit in with your design. More whitespace, less words, less gimmicks, more thought.

Nope. You will get taken to a screen where you specify if you want to pay via your PayPal account, or just credit/debit.
 
I used simplecart.js on my site, as I was not happy with the very generic styling of the PayPal cart. It was really easy to implement and meant I had more control over how the cart displayed. I created my own Add to Basket buttons, basket viewer (slide-out from the side) and my own checkout page.
 
Took about 5 minutes to get the basic simplecart.js functionality working, then it was just a case of styling it and working with my own jQuery to refine the customer journey.
 
Example:

Why don't you ask for advice on how to do it rather than asking someone to do it for you.

I suggest using a 'HTML Kitchen Sink' on new site builds. This is a block of HTML that you can find generators for across the web, which lists pretty much all relevant semantic markup.
 
You can paste this into a page and it'll give you your h1, h2, h3, tables, bullet lists, links etc. Style this page up, bringing your font sizes and colours inline with each other before you start building. Then you know that referencing 'h1' tags across your site will yield the same result and the site will stay on brand.
 
E.g, your feature colours for the site are purple and green. Your main text is dark grey. Adjust p to dark grey, h1's to green and h2's to purple (or whatever your particular style choice are.) Get yourself happy with the way the semantics work in your HTML Kitchen Sink page, and then use that across your site.
 
You can delete the kitchen sink at the end before live.
 
http://prandall.com/downloads/kitchensink.htm

Ooh I'll look into that, going to polish the design off a little... but it's got me a few orders and as much business as I can handle at the moment
 
 
Thanks! I've got some fun artwork coming soon too that a friend of mine has put together (instead of the hot air balloon, there will be a hot air balloon but with a sheep in it, and a friend has drawn me another of a sheep hiking a mountain made from balls of wool. It's amazing!)

iems
 
All of the advice you have been given, especially by Pete and Rallport is spot on. There's no need for me to add anything to that. But I thought I'd just say the following...
 
Do not think you are alone in the position you are in now. Virtually all of us started out in a similar way to you, and at some point we all had to get knocked down and given a reality check. Those that can cope with that, learn from their mistakes, take the advice on board and start doing things properly - those are us who end up lucky enough to work in this industry. Those who can't, end up losing interest due to frustration and give up. I severely doubt a single person on this forum woke up one day and straight away started producing well designed, clean coded websites. We probably all started with "website builders" and tacky software.
 
My first foray into web design was slapping together websites on Yahoo Geocities. They were just as bad as yours - actually they were worse. They had no purpose. They were just a random assortment of images and text and videos.
 
I took it a little more seriously when I was about 15 by putting together pages for school projects using Front Page. Again, not really the correct way to build websites.
 
When I started participating in forums and communities for websites, showing my work, a few years ago I got knocked down too. I had people emailing me telling me to give up, that web design isn't for me, and that I was talentless. Seriously, some people struggle to toe the line between helpful criticism and harsh reality checks - and just being plain bullies. You're lucky because so far as I can tell, nobody on here has sent you abuse like I got.
 
If you can take on board everything you've been told and you can work hard over the next few months, learning HTML/CSS, learning a CMS like WordPress, learning how to work with colour, typography, design skills....then there is no reason why you can't be creating quality, decent websites.
 
This is why I always say tenacity is by far and way the most critical personality trait of a web designer. You have got to be able to take it. I did - and now I'm extremely proud to be able to label myself a Web Designer and that is is my full time career.
 
Good luck. "Good things come to those who wait".

genius.

Those guidelines are pure p***.
Let's break it down....
 
 
No! Never use them.
 
 
Well this very much depends on the point if the site.... Full screen images any one?
 
 
Hello? No body heard of jpg, png... svg?
 
 
And why are you using gifs as links in the first place?
 
 
Throws up a little in mouth...
 
 
Frames or iframes? Either way....
 
 
The modern we is built with Javascript. To avoid using it would be stupid.
Be frugal with it and clever, but don't avoid it.
 
 
Let me fetch my glasses... We all know this statement is rubbish. 15" monitors and limited colour pallets oh my!

Definitely don't do this. If you don't have a lot of content, rethink your site to adapt to that. Never create content just to fill space. A website is merely a holder for your information. The content available to you should control the design, not the other way around.
 
In short, make a website for your content. Don't make content for your website.
 
 
I'd suggest that this would be a last resort for a slow site, and perhaps some attention could be paid to optimising the images etc rather than simply 'getting a new server'.

I can thoroughly recommend Simplecart, http://simplecartjs.org/
 
Simple to set up, easy to style, light and fast as hell. Paypal (or any other gateway provider) will always get their pound of flesh, there's no escaping that.

Here is the balloons html and css isolated: http://codepen.io/HeyDanReeves/pen/kretq
 
It's just a CSS3 animation.

"Crap" isn't constructive.
 
 
Scrap your critique, start again but follow these guidelines: http://www.webdesignerforum.co.uk/topic/32744-read-this-before-reviewing-someones-work/

I disagree with that. Just because you might use a template doesn't mean you can't design something. You've just chosen not to for that project and for whatever reasons.

This, exactly. I'm currently talking to someone who wants a site, and I'm planning to tell them this is what would be best. They're a student photographer, they make a bit of money but not enough to have a bespoke site, they want something to show to friends/employers and they need to update it with new projects regularly. They can't afford the bespoke site (and I can't do it for them, so I'd have to refer them on to someone more expensive.)
 
I literally see no problem with selling them a template site that is adjusted to their needs. Am I selling out because I'm giving someone who can't really afford anything different a good looking, functioning site? Am I a bad web designer for giving them a product that perfectly suits their needs, budgets, requirements? Am I 'pathetic' as someone in this thread said?
 
I really don't get it. Yes people who sell themes as their own work and call themselves web designers are cowboys, but that doesn't mean there is no reason to use templates in the correct situation.

This, exactly. I'm currently talking to someone who wants a site, and I'm planning to tell them this is what would be best. They're a student photographer, they make a bit of money but not enough to have a bespoke site, they want something to show to friends/employers and they need to update it with new projects regularly. They can't afford the bespoke site (and I can't do it for them, so I'd have to refer them on to someone more expensive.)
 
I literally see no problem with selling them a template site that is adjusted to their needs. Am I selling out because I'm giving someone who can't really afford anything different a good looking, functioning site? Am I a bad web designer for giving them a product that perfectly suits their needs, budgets, requirements? Am I 'pathetic' as someone in this thread said?
 
I really don't get it. Yes people who sell themes as their own work and call themselves web designers are cowboys, but that doesn't mean there is no reason to use templates in the correct situation.

This, exactly. I'm currently talking to someone who wants a site, and I'm planning to tell them this is what would be best. They're a student photographer, they make a bit of money but not enough to have a bespoke site, they want something to show to friends/employers and they need to update it with new projects regularly. They can't afford the bespoke site (and I can't do it for them, so I'd have to refer them on to someone more expensive.)
 
I literally see no problem with selling them a template site that is adjusted to their needs. Am I selling out because I'm giving someone who can't really afford anything different a good looking, functioning site? Am I a bad web designer for giving them a product that perfectly suits their needs, budgets, requirements? Am I 'pathetic' as someone in this thread said?
 
I really don't get it. Yes people who sell themes as their own work and call themselves web designers are cowboys, but that doesn't mean there is no reason to use templates in the correct situation.

Amen to that!
 
Because believe it or not, it is the message (copy), not the presentation that sells! Good copy averagely presented will out-perform terrible copy with great 'design' every time.

Yup. If the client has a very small budget, the best thing we can do is take a smaller bite of it, wearing our project manager's hat.
 
Client A came to me needing results with £250 to spend, I'd use my knowledge and expertise to do a couple of hours' research and planning/IA/etc and pick the best template for their needs. I'd devote the rest of their budget to a good copywriter - something nearly all clients need more than anything else. Yes, more than they need you or me.
 
You have a lot more chance at delivering a successful site with a template and good copy than you do with a bespoke design - no matter how good - and bad copy.