Nickalocka

a forum would do the trick, which could be installed onto a subdomain

I too would recommend against uni for web development. The curriculum is laughably outdated, and it takes so much bureaucratic nonsense to update or change anything that by the time it's done - the industry has changed again and it's still outdated. I completed a HND this year and before that I was on a BTEC. It's all been such a massive waste of time and I haven't bothered going onto the last year to get a full bachelors. Most uni's are still sticking all computer subjects together under one course. So you have 18 units of wildly different things and end up learning nothing at all, especially if the course you go for also lumps in business subjects like mine did. Save yourself the debt! There are tons of resources online to learn anything you could want for free, and some better ones if you don't mind paying.

Remove the heights and add some padding to nav a, then they will all be even and centered inside their buttons. nav a { padding: 25px 0; } also, for the colour changing hover - rather than using ID's for each nav item look into using the nth-child selector.

Brilliant, I really like it. Two things I would change if i was being picky: the "book online" button I would have white with black text, just to really make it stand out. and the white text used on all the slideshow headers is a bit hard to read, on some of the slides more than others. A shadow or an outline would sort that. Or maybe changing it to the #b49a60 colour your using for your other buttons.

I'd be very interested in this! particularly anything to do with JavaScript and preprocessors. I have lots of experience with HTML and CSS (though I have no doubt I could still learn a lot more) but have only recently started teaching myself JS. I discovered TextPattern last year and it's become my favourite CMS ... which extensions did you develop?

I agree with start simple and small, have you tried building just a basic CMS setup with one admin user yet? There are billions of tutorials out there for that, then once you have that working you can look into adding additional features.

Other than the updates and offers page I think it's looking pretty good. If it was me I'd separate them, offers and updates as one page, then reviews on another. If I was a customer clicking on it looking for offers I'd expect to see them displayed right there, not have to trawl through a facebook feed for them. In fact it might make sense to have the offers display at the top of their relevant section when they're available. I'm not familiar with how squarespace works but I think a "view all" button of some sort would be a nice touch, so would a filtering system - not so much now but when the site has a ton of products on it. (sort by price for example)

It's much better now, the header text is no longer overlapping. (in chrome anyway, IE may still be having issues) I would probably center at least images for mobiles; and the "welcome to dottie hats" underneath the photo on the home page could do with a bit more space, it's right up against the image.

I'm a little confused by your question - what sort of apps are you wanting to create? You can indeed create websites using visual studio, their used to be seperate IDEs for desktop, mobile and web apps but a quick look tells me this is no longer the case with the new version.

For some reason the images in the slideshow view don't show up for me when my adblocker is turned on. I have no idea why that would happen. I think an image from each set would be a nice touch on the print series page. The contact page could do with a contact form, make things as easy as possible for visitors to get in touch. I don't feel like most of the stuff on the contact page really fits there, the actual contact info is all the way down the bottom, at the very least I would move that to the top.

I agree with the two points made above - it's slow to load and the huge overlay is off putting. I think the image on your about page would look better with some more padding and your contact form fields would be nicer if they were all the same width. Unless you plan to have other contributors I don't think putting your name under each articles title or having an "about the author" box at the end of each article is needed. You might consider splitting your articles across two pages, the handful I looked at were quite long. This would also help with analytics, you'd be able to track the interest in your articles better by seeing how often people clicked through to page two after reading the first part. There are also JavaScript errors, which could be the cause of the loading issue.

Yeah if you do well enough to become an influential content creator within a niche you can do quite well with sponsorships and get a nice bit of free stuff, the struggle is getting to that point. All the niche sites I frequent had very humble beginnings and did seem to be created just for the love of the subject - eventually going on to become full fledged money makers. If you have something you like doing that has less expensive start-up costs you could be on to a winner, starting up a content based website purely for the profit will be an uphill battle I think if you aren't interested in the subject.

You could use PHP to create your own templates. Place the header in it's own file and then call it with: <?php require 'header.php';?> Do the same for all your "modules" - footer, menu, etc My favourite CMS is TextPattern and I think you'd like it too based on your requirements. If you like I would be happy to take you through setting it up.

ah yeah you're right! The site isn't responsive

As someone who lives in a very small village I would make use of a village website if it existed, local business info and reviews, general goings on at the village hall and church and whatnot. There have been many times I've attempted to google something very local and gotten no results. I really can't see a project like that making any money though unfortunately, even with ads the visitor rate would be so low it would barely be worth putting them there. Perhaps you should start with a blog, and write about whatever tickles your fancy. If you find yourself gravitating towards a specific subject or any become particularly popular you can go from there and re-evaluate.

The alignment looks fine to me - did the client provide a screenshot?

For now smart-watches are designed to be an accompaniment to a phone rather than a replacement, so I would say it's not worth bothering making a site work on them (do they even have browsers?) They could be used to enhance certain website features - notifications, pushing maps to the watch, activating a phone call on a contact page. Though all of those things will probably be sent to the phone, which then interacts with the watch. I really don't know much about how they work, can they still be used by themselves?

I didn't think about the extra scrolling, that is true. I'd be interested in what other users with larger screens think of this - I'll start asking around! Having to zoom in is only a minor annoyance really, it just strikes me as strange - to me responsive design should cover everything where at all possible.

Increasing font sizes across the board after a certain point should mean the lines of text don't go on too long wouldn't it? I thought the same thing about target audiences, but I've still noticed even sites where you would expect most people to have a bigger than average screen they still stop at 1366. I can understand the budget not allowing for reworking a framework. I've used skeleton CSS in a few projects which has fixed width, I did find an alternative version that uses percentages for everything and there are several version of the grid with bigger max-widths. It's something I struggle with when designing - I want my design to look great no matter what size but it can be difficult. Image sizes are also an issue unless you've gone to the trouble of loading totally different images for different screen sizes, if you have images that are gonna look perfectly crisp when they are on a massive screen it's needlessly loading something huge for a mobile.

Something that baffles me is how most websites will be fully responsive for mobiles, yet have a maximum width to prevent content from scaling up for larger screens. 1366 x 768 seems to be as high as designers will go. Is there a reason hardly anyone bothers? Is the percentage of people with larger screens really so small that it isn't worth doing? I spend my time browsing with a 150% zoom most of the time so I can read things and this seems silly when to me all it seems it would take is an additional break-point to increase the font size and leaving out the maximum width constraint. You guys got any thoughts on this? Do you design for big screens as well as mobiles and everything in between?

In my opinion it depends on the quality of CMS you can create (security etc) and the type of client you're making a site for. If your uncle wants a blog to talk about gardening - sure, use your own CMS, what's the worst that could happen? I would say the same for any basic business card style site - just a couple of info pages and a contact form sort of thing. The odds of somebody wanting to go to the trouble of breaking into such a site are slim; and even if they did, it's not really a big deal if there are backups available. Any site holding any sort of details you wouldn't want compromised - even a list of subscriber email addresses - I would say it would be a bad idea to use your own until you were confident enough in your abilities.

I like to learn by doing, so building a nice simple blog site in a text editor will be a really good start into the world of HTML and CSS - then you can add fancier things by looking into JavaScript. When I started learning geocities was a thing, so I just hosted my stuff for free on there. I'm sure there are still free hosts around today you can throw stuff up on to just for practicing, then eventually you can buy a domain name and server space. You can get them super cheap, especially on an introductory offer.

Hi! I'm new to the forums too. I agree with the above poster. You'll probably learn a lot more by building a static site and it'll be faster than using a CMS. I'm not familiar with Jekyll, it looks interesting though. I would still say that if you're a total beginner that building a static site would be more beneficial to learn the basics before introducing any tools. I personally don't like Wordpress and use Textpattern for most of the sites I build, it's much more lightweight and I find it easier to use.

Hi There! I'm Nick Strife, 26 years old and living in North East England. I've been building websites since the days of Geocities as a hobby. In the past couple of years I've been completing projects for clients as a freelancer and learning more and more outside the scope of just HTML and CSS; dabbling in JS/Jquery, PHP, C#, ASP.NET and mySQL/SQL. I'm at the point now where I feel I'd learn more if I got involved with a community so here I am!