Ben Hodgson

What is the point of it then? What extra benefit is gained from using jQuery to load the content? All I can see is that it is calling another HTML page in with a fancy fade effect. You can do this without breaking the back button, breaking URLs, potentially ruining your SEO, or being useless for anyone with javascript disabled. If anything it does more to ruin the user experience than a standard site without any of the fancy crossfading (which doesn't work properly anyway as the content loads, then disappears, then fades in again). It's not a simple one page site (not sure where content management comes into it either). Its a simple one page site that has been made pointlessly over-complicated and less intuitive by the use of javascript just for the sake of it. Not sure how Google come into it, but I've not noticed any situation where they fade between pages just because they can, (and my employers are doing perfectly fine, thanks). It's nice that you've tried to make a tutorial and offer an idea for people, but the simple fact is that it's not a particularly great way of doing things, and if you post it on a forum full of web designers and developers you can't expect it to pass by without comment if thats the case.

Not particularly well executed and does the one thing that really really really annoys me about using javascript for the sake of javascript; it breaks the back button. If I've just seen something, click another link but want to go back to the previous page, I have to remember/find the link that took me there, rather than just doing the instinctive thing and hit the back button. Lets say I do like your site and want to link a certain page to your colleague, say your 'about' page, rather than the root of your site. I can't, because the URL doesn't change. If I do link to your about page, I get this: http://www.webcomsystems.biz/about.html SEO is not just about having keywords and descriptions. Once upon a time yes, but search engine spiders are more intelligent than that. Having good quality URLs is just as important as anything else, and your method completely scuppers any chance of your site being well indexed. If the spiders do find their way through to other pages, they will get indexed in the way I linked to above. In terms of saving clients money, I'm not sure of the logic there, as you still have to create extra pages for each bit of content. If you've got the site structure built anyway, theres no extra work at all in creating your site the usual way. There are better ways to do what you've tried to do I'm afraid. (As a sidenote, and just so you know, you're linking to the W3C Validator on your site, but your code is invalid)

Instead of a grey off-white, try a creamy off-white instead. Always works well with blues. Something like #f9f9f3 or thereabouts. That said, I think the white looks fine.

Doesn't say festival to me. The original was better (if a little cliché, the sky and grass idea is overused on festival sites now) and more relevant. That just looks like you've found an image of some brush strokes and stuck it in there because it looks kinda cool, but with little thought. I'd say go back to the original. Either have a green background for the length of the page, or stick a green to white gradient in at the bottom of the grass about 200 - 300 pixels tall so it doesn't just stop dead. The navigation gets a bit lost. Give it some more space. Maybe tab them or box them in. Just give them something that says its there and it wants to be clicked. Don't understand why you have thumbnails for all your sub-headlines, but not for your main story. Try sticking a full width image between the date line and the headline, about the same/slightly taller than the thumbnails. The 'Read Full Story' links on the sub-headlines are a bit mixed in. Try moving them onto the right hand side of the same line as the date, in the same font as the date.

The frame appears to be part of the domain forwarding, so it will send you to the correct site whilst still showing you the .com address. This is bad. It means if you click through to another page, the domain in your URL bar never changes. Assuming I see something on the training page and want to send the link to someone else, I can't send a direct link. If your domain registrar offers it, just pick the non-framed forwarding option. Its not like you're trying to mask a really long or unprofessional looking URL anyway. Disagree about the font sizes, 1.1em is fine. You've used header tags in the right places, lists for menus. It's pretty well coded (couple of validation errors, but easy to fix). My only real bug is that some of the content seems very bunched together. Experiment with spacing out sections, paragraphs, list items, and line heights a bit more. The text in the 'Next Event' section on the right is especially bad, its just a jumble of words I couldn't be bothered to read as a result. Space it all out a bit more, paragraph it etc... As for the design, I think its a good start. It doesn't need to be hugely exciting. Maybe get some photos (not cheesy stock ones if you can avoid it) to split up the content a bit more, but really I don't think this needs to be a huge graphical masterpiece. Its the kind of site where the people visiting will know what you're on about and be interested in what you have to say more than anything, so copy will speak louder than graphics. Good start

Canon 400D with stock 18-55, Sigma 10-20, and a Speedlite 430EX flash. The Sigma is fantastic, great for landscapes: http://www.flickr.com/photos/benhodgson/

Quite like the design, don't like the random stock photography. Your logo also looks kind of basic and amateurish in comparison to the actual site.

Thanks all. I'll look at making it all a bit bigger at some point. I did experiment with a style switcher, but decided to stick with the pink one. For now though, the site has served its purpose and I've just accepted a web developer and designer role up in London, so one very happy Ben at the moment! Cheers for all your feedback.

I'm still chuckling at "earth quack", so I'll keep it short. You seriously need to spell check everything. Putting it into Word and using that one, or if you have Firefox just find a text box to paste it into, is a good start. Designwise I'm not sure. The navigation bar seems insignificant. It blends in too much with the background and feels too small and shoved to the side. Especially as blog lies over a similarly coloured star on the background. The colour scheme feels a bit random too. Your logo has red in it, but you've picked light pink as a highlight colour. Using a red in place of the pink would be far more uniform and effective. I'd also suggest a bit more spacing between the three columns. Looks a bit bunched together. Be careful with your logo. It's quite tall, and in smaller resolutions won't be completely visible. Just tested it in 1024x768, and when the page loads all the visitor can read is "design.com" unless they scroll, and you don't appear to mention your company name anywhere else. On which note, you've fallen into the "me" and "we" trap. On the left column you use the collective "we" as though it is a company of many people, while on the right you use "I" as though it is your personal portfolio. Choose one and stick with it!

By the looks of it the white is because the background image isn't tall enough and the page background colour is set to white, so anyone with a resolution taller than the background image gets a white box.

Is there meant to be a massive white box at the bottom of the page, causing a horizontal scroll bar in Firefox?

Not a fan of that rainbow header, is a bit too bright and garish I think, plus the gradients come across a little bit "I've just discovered the Photoshop gradient tool" as well. I'd also run a spell checker over your site as well, there are a few spelling and grammar errors on your index page. As for fixing your validation errors: 1. <script LANGUAGE="JavaScript"> should be... <script type="text/javascript"> 2. You have two opening head tags on your photography page: <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="../style.css" /> <head> <title>Alternative Stuff :: Photography</title> 3. You need a trailing slash on all your META and IMG tags, so they should be: <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" /> <meta http-equiv="imagetoolbar" content="no" /> and <img class="main" src="images/Picture 507.JPG" alt="" border="0" /> Remember, with XHTML, anything that doesn't have a separate closing tag needs a trailing slash.

Echo the carbon fiber effect used on the logo text as the background, so it looks like the logo is kinda cut out, and stick a 468x60 banner in the whitespace?

Chalet Book But in terms of web safe system fonts, Verdana.

Ah, thought the black background was transparent PNGs gone wrong, didn't notice IE had a different stylesheet. The IE version doesn't look anywhere as slick as the Firefox one. Just seems quite messy in comparison. Ideally a site should look the same in any browser.