DigitalYak

Its like you say, the premise of only working a job you love sounds great but in practice it's not always a reality. I've moved from working for a design firm to being freelance because I love to be my own boss and don't like to compromise on a design, that and I like to be flexible enough to go climbing when the weather is good Being freelance is a lot more work then working for a firm ever was and way more stressful because of the demands of keeping the money coming in, however, my time is my own and no one else's and I wouldn't trade that for the world. it's about make sure you make the most for your priorities, no job is perfect, regardless of what people tell you.

Youmay need to adjust the transparency settings on your images if you have used drop shadows or are saving onto a transparent background, if file size is not an issue save them as .png 24 files and that should solve the issue. A white hazy pixilated border is common using transparency features on gifs so you may have this issue. Hope this helps your design issue.

It's a really nice clean looking site, it does scroll into a big white nothingness for some reason, you may want to adjust the height on that particular div untill you fill up the space with your work, but other than that its a nice website.

My advice is to go with Joomla, its always been my preference for developeing CMS wesites for clients, the admin portal is very user freindly and becuase its open source the support forums are second to none.

I like options in the hardware department, the amount of times I have to listen to other designers i know complaining about the bill to fix or replace mac parts. You can just rock into a computer store and grab a component of the shelf and fit it yourself in a mac, you can with a pc. saying all that i have both, because I'm a tech hoarder! but 99% of all my work is done on pc.

The logo is fine, but it doesn't really tell me what you do as a business. Try and factor some design elements in to the logo that point your potential customers in the right direction.

Charge you client based on the project and your clients budget. My hourly rate is flexible enough to lower my rate if I get a project a really want to be involved with. Don't get too caught up in working out how much to charge before you plan out a project and see how much of your time and resources are going to be taken up.

Personally I would run with Joomla over wordpress, it's a lot more flexible for you as a designer and your client for moving forward. Now I'll quietly walk away as the Joomla vs Wordpress argument begins

Hi Flowdy, Ill be brutaly honest, you would be best in the long run to go back to the start and code without using tables. Adding CSS style to tables will always cause you problems as they only acept a limited amount of CSS coding. The best solution is to create Divs and assign the CSS to them, you will have a lot more freedom when desigingn if you msater coding using Divs with CSS. check out the 1stoptutorials website, there is a full video series on how to code a CSS website from scratch. Hope this helps.

the best thing to do is to find a JQuery script that matches your desired gallery effects as closely as possible and work with that.

I'm not 100% sure what your are trying to achieve but you could try using anchored links inside pages to directly link to the page content.

Welcome to the Forum

Well first off it's great to see you coding the site from scratch, big thumbs up for that. I like the layout, it will be very easy for your clients customers to navigate. my only thought would be to maybe add some extra design elements into the site to make it more personal to your client, think about who they are and what they do as a business and add some depth to the overall design. This could be creating a more styled background or making the navigation buttons a bit more quirky. overall it's a nice site.

It's very chaotic, you need to bring the site back to basics. First, grab a pencil and a sketch pad and play with ideas on paper, make sure you think about your sites users, navigation and browser compatibility before you design. I know it can be easy to get carried away with trying t use every bit of new CSS3 HTML5 code tricks but sometimes less really is more. hope this helps.

The best way to make sure you images are helping your SEO is to first name them correctly and to make sure you have your key words included in the image title tag. Remember that the alt tag for the image was create to help people with disabilitys so finish your alt tag text with a full stop then a space, as this will help people with text readers. Title tags do help with SEO but you have to make sure the keywords in them are relevant to the image subject matter. Hope this helps.