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.

Still doing it. Firefox 3 on XP SP2. Seems to be OK in Safari on my Mac, and IE7, so may just be a Firefox problem. Looks a bit of a mess in IE6 and IE7 though.

On the 'About Me' page where you blame twitter for the invalid code, its actually something you could have fixed. Just change the ampersands (&) in the Twitter script to & You've also got a closing div at the end of your document (line 128) for a div that isn't actually open.

Design/layout wise, its a free template so theres not a lot to say, other than the background of your logo being a slightly lighter shade of grey to the page background (its a .bmp, so made in Paint??). You've got some validation errors, but actually not too terrible. You just need to swap all your linebreaks from <br> to <br />, or set the doctype to HTML 4.01 rather than XHTML 1.0. You need more pictures. I don't know how good a job you are capable of doing if there aren't photographic examples of your work. Those black and white stock images would be much better as full-colour photos of cars you've detailed. Before and after would be a good example too.

Firefox 3

For some reason, on the web work page when I use the scroll wheel on my mouse it scrolls reeeeeeeally slowly, and is kinda frustrating. Dragging the slider is slower than normal as well. Seems to be happening to that page and the very bottom of the snaps page, dodgy script somewhere maybe? None of your pages validate either (use of id instead of span where there are multiple instances of the same div, no alt tags on your images, missing trailing slashes on image tags), despite the link to the validator in your footer claiming otherwise. I'd also be careful about rating yourself 100% on skills (especially when your own portfolio has the aforementioned validation problems), it can give the wrong impression. You may be good at Adobe CS3, HTML and CSS, but if you imply that you're good, but always striving to be better, it will ultimately reflect better on you to potential employers than someone who comes across as a bit cocky. Outside of those, some great improvements. Good work.

Your portfolio seems to go back and forth like a yoyo. You've got a couple of stunning sites, mixed in with a few that have the potential to let you down. The first I clicked was for Blaque Fashion, and as with Matthuseless's comment on your contact page, it literally hurt my eyes. To me it doesn't say high end fashion, it says early 90's Geocities page. It may be under construction, but its still representing your eye for design. The second was the urban lawyer one, where the first page contains a small-ish image that has been resized in the IMG tag, meaning the smooth edges of the original image become blocky and horrible. The rest of that site is OK but has loads of dead links (Edit: just noticed it's also under construction so fair enough, but still don't think under construction projects have a place in any portfolio. Mention that you're working with a new client in your news section maybe, but don't link to an unfinished site). Yet then, I click the link for Roma Bravo and it's a work of genius. A beautiful bit of work. Couple of other points: - Dead link on your PDF portfolio, and your CV is in .docx format so won't be viewable by anyone with older versions of word. You're best setting compatibility to Word 99 - 2004, or save it as a PDF as well. - In some parts of the site you refer to your operation as 'we' or 'our' and imply that there is a group of people involved, in others you use 'me' and 'I', implying that it's your personal portfolio. Choose one or the other and stick with it. If your aim is to get employment from the site within an agency or similar, make it personal, they won't want to hire a whole company! - Your logo has the same problem as the Urban Lawyer front page, except this time a large image resized smaller. Make the image the size you want it to appear on the page. Means you have the benefit of anti-aliasing (because only Safari will do it for you in browser, FF2 & IE will give you pixellated edges), and with bigger images being made smaller, you save all important load times/bandwidth. Otherwise with a little bit of tidying up it's got great potential. Look forward to seeing it progress

How about aligning the logo to the left, and having the top navigation vertically to the right, with a right align on the text. Would make the nav a bit more interesting at least. Not too sure about that "Thanks for visiting" strap beneath the footer either. Makes the bottom of the page look very crowded, and drowns out the footer text. Also, not sure if this is just in Safari, but the outer glow on the main content box stops level with where it says "Michael Gainford" in the first paragraph.

Hobby. Did some sort of professional work occasionally shooting nights in the bar I worked at for a bit of extra cash on the side of the bar work, hence the Scott Mills pics, but other than that its all just hobby stuff.

You can never have too many Bens! Thanks for the welcome.

Strange. Loading fine for me, is it giving an error message, or just blankness?