LeeSalter

My Self Assessment is now due! Do you guys use any accounting software to keep track of your profit and loss etc. Can anybody recommend any software that generates Balance Sheets, Profit and Loss accounts etc that can be used to satisfy the requirements of the HMRC??

There are some great Photoshop tutorials on SmashingMagazine at the moment - If only I had Photoshop! lol. Click here for the tutorials

I'm a 35 year old "on-the-side" type freelancer, with a full-time paid job and I STILL can't afford it!! I'm going to have to bite the bullet one day - I've been using PSP X2 for a few weeks and whilst it does the basics well, 99% of the tutorials out there for image manipulation are for Photoshop, so I guess it's costing me money NOT to buy CS4.

The photos of the lovely ladies look fine to me. The images of Pepsi, Coca-Cola etc are heavily pixelated. Your designer should be using Vector images for these as they will then scale properly without loss of clarity or quality.

Been doing a little research.... Doesn't validate -- also has inline stlying. tut tut. Doesn't validate Doesn't validate Validates - Transitional. Only 41 validation errors on this one Only 21 validation erros in this one Just the 38 errors here ... and all that with 8 years experiance huh! go figure! @James, stick with it mate. you never know when you get a whole 8 years under your belt, you too can make sites for your clients that don't validate, have 41 validation errors in them and then come onto a Web Forum and spout off about how brilliant you are.

Try this

The compliant way to do this would be to have this in your styelsheet: a img {border:none;}

You're right there Andy, I did have it a lot bigger, but it took up too much room. I've not had time to tinker with it for a few days...hoping to get some work in over the weekend and will look to improve that. I quite like the idea of the title popping outside of the image, personally. I'll try your suggestion though, see how it looks. Thanks (it's one of the Berlin fonts). Agree about the shadow on the Gallery title page, I think the others are ok. Yes, time to get my creative thinking cap on. Of course, I've only layed these out to see how it looks so far, there probably wont be 16 thumbnail images on that page in the end and it will have more content to break it up. Thanks for taking the time to look and make comment.

If you want to see CSS in action, check out CSS Zen Garden. This site is comprised of many pages that have the exact same XHTML markup but with different stylesheets applied to them, resulting in a demonstration of the power of CSS.

Your site is a million times beter than pcbuyerbeware. Of course, those comments may have been made before you've had a chance to correct those spelling and grammatical errors. A small lesson to be learned there - don't showcase your site professionally until it's 100% complete.

I like ... Fantasty Interactive. Lovely and clean and what a portfolio of work!!

lol - me neither! Never seem to have a spare £600 lying around! I'm currently using Paint Shop Pro X2!

Very impressive Aram!! Excellent work. The pages do take a while to load for me (although I'm at work at the moment and we don't have the fastest connection), but otherwise a very good job.

Actually, I'm already married and was being unnecessarliy argumentative! My apologies. However, to craft a good website that I'd be willing to hang the name of my company and it's reputation upon, takes longer than playing a set at somebody's wedding for three or so hours. An unfair exchange, methinks.

I think that both Notbanksy and Jeff are both correct in their opinions. I have absolutely no natural design talent whatsoever! I do think that it's something that either you're born with or you're not. I only design freelance to earn some extra pocket money on the side (all declared to the tax man and above-board, of course) and have only really been doing it for a year or so. I am technical by trade as a C# programmer. If you can learn from the correct books and perhaps take inspiration from books, magazines and other great sites that you look at and use, then I think it is possible to produce some really good work. But looking at the work that Jeff has produced (Pirates and Pasties), I'd say thay he has a natural flair for design. I've dabbled with Flash in the past and found it incredibly difficult to produce something that comes anywhere near good enough to put on the internet. I'd like to think, however, that given time (and the right stock images!) I could create a nice flash site. But it would take an awfully long time! Stick with it SnowyWebSolutions, take the advice given on here and learn from it. I'm sure that you'll soon be able to produce some respectable work.

Love it! Great work Jeff! Reminds me of Monthy Python! lol.

Will you come and play a gig at my wedding free of charge?

You need a Content Management System, my friend. Take a look at Wordpress, Droopal or Cushy CMS (not got the links to hand, sorry). Expression Engine is my favourite.

I love the ribbon but I'm not sure if it leads my focus away from the actual content of your site rather than draws me into it. I'd also consider making the images in your Case Studies section slightly opaque and then setting opacity to 100% when hovered over. Whilst I'm in the Case Studies section, you also have a grammatically incorrect use of "there" in the Clubland section, should be "their". Sorry, I get tetchy with incorrect use of grammar and is the one thing guaranteed to turn me away from using a site or service.

Your text is hard to read because it's right-aligned - I know that you're trying to be different in this regard but I don't think it's working. Also, on your homepage, where you say , why don't you make a link right there to your contacts page rather than have the user look around for the link in the menu. You do need to sort the code out too, it's a bit messy (well, very messy). You need to make sure that it validates. Don't be dis-heartened with the comments so far, practice makes perfect.

Nice to see Rawkes in that list! :-)

One of the best and most professional looking sites I've seen in a while. Excellent work.

Did you not see the Portfolio link at the bottom?

Hi again all, So, my creative juices are not exactly flowing at the moment. If you check out the Gallery page, I think it's in need of a little something. Whilst I pop off and try to find a bit of inspiration from somewhere, has anybody got any ideas or suggestions? TIA.

It was Rickton. That's where i got the link from. :-) Great, great site.