evo design

Well I'm not too sure about selling eyes and buying customers but I do agree with the rest. In this business you seem to have a choice. Design for yourself. Design for you target market. If you're amazing, like Vault49 amazing then you can probably design for yourself and you'll be good enough to be hired on spec. For everyone else we need to tame the beast that lies within and sell out a little. This often means holding back on the edgy, urban, grungetastic designer within in order to appeal to the guy down the road who sells furniture, or the lady who sells flowers or whatever it is. So, my advice would be - if you're very good, and you can sell yourself to big clients then go for it.. Otherwise, choose some new fonts and follow the advice above. It's not a criticism of your work, it's a criticism of your marketing. And if you think you're alone, you're not - my first portfolio was grossly lost under a sea of self-indulgence.

I agree with T_Break about it looking like a template and it's basically for no other reason that the model. I think you could lose the model and keep the clouds and it would look less template like and lose a little of that over-corporate look too. The only other consideration is it took me a moment or two to locate work examples and I was almost about to give up. You're probably thinking what a weirdo - but this is usability defined. A final point is I am at a loss at to understand. The markup contains a few tables when clearly your markup suggests you know enough about standards based design to not use them for styling. Is there any reason?

This looks great... Happy coding...

If you friends sells the same products as the established people and doesn't offer any wider value added services or knowledge then it's not going to happen unless you have a huge online and offline advertising budget. People will always choose established brands over any alternatives unless they're paying less for the same thing or getting something more - like a value added service. That said I don't think for a business to function well you need to target the biggest players in the market as your competition. One thing I would pay a great deal of attention to is your SEO. It's likely that you won't compete for keywords like central heating, or designer taps etc.. but if your friend sells specific products or niche market designer items you can compete for these keywords and capture business accordingly. The only other things that could help would be an uber cool brand that offers huge aesthetic appeal. Backed up with nice useable web 2.0 features these bells and whistles may help entice people - any you may look at some form of viral marketing to build the brand. That's about all I have...

Hi WDL, I guess I'm a little late to this party but here goes. My comments are not angled toward the site so much as to marketing. Creating mock portfolio sites is something I think we've all done, and I know people who do it. There's nothing lame or unethical about it - it's a perfectly valid way of demonstrating what you're capable of. It's actually a pretty difficult thing to do since content drives the creative process and thickens the site and where you have none it can get challenging. In terms of your mock brand I think it looks great and I wouldn't argue with your creative capacity. My criticism would be this... You potential clients are unlikely, at first at least, to be media savvy's looking for the next YouTube. As such they are unlikely to relate or empathise with this sort of website. I would suggest you list all the sorts of businesses you're keen on attracting. Maybe hair salons, maybe book stores, maybe furniture retailers - it doesn't really matter. Select some truly awful website examples locally - and trust me, being from your town I know there's no shortage. Then set about building some examples in these target markets. You will get more luck showing your clients a nice version of what they do, than a nice version of what YouTube does. Good luck...

For me personally I don't like the look of the site. It harks back to a few years ago when everything looked like a web hosting account template. That aside, as there is no accounting for taste, from an objective point of view the site could benefit from being re-written in standards based code. At the moment it's a hodge podge of tables, inline styles which make it poor for SEO, poor for scaling and poor for maintaining. The main text on the homepage is an image and therefore is a throw away of good textual content that search engines could soak up. Each page title mentions the company name but nothing about what they do, so again could be improved for SEO. Image rollovers are used for navigation where CSS would comfortably manage. And in Safari the copyright notice goes wandering. And based on the amount of pages and content I would recommend building it in Expression Engine. But this last point may be because I am the EE poster boy. But it would give the client editorial access to their website - something which seems to be a major selling point.

Hi User54 Firstly great work on getting your coding skills up to scratch after a few months. I would certainly echo Dizi - you're at the classic stage in standards based development in which we simply use CSS as a means to achieve what we used to do with tables. You need to look more at the semantics of your markup. http://webdesign.about.com/od/semanticweb/a/aa022006.htm At the moment you're creating divs as style hooks to craft your style sheet. What you want to do is replace these divs with markup that better defines each element of your document. Not only will this improve the site structure and help SEO but it will dramatically simplify your pages and offer endless CSS style hooks. On the style front I know what Andymayhem means about this style of illustration but I don't believe it's out of date - in much the same way I don't believe any technique deployed effectively can be called out of date. I do however feel it's not working as is, and is not the best example of this sort of illustration I've seen. If it were me, and only as a suggestion, I would either - lose the illustration and concentrate more on a nice range of colour see Adobe Kuler or lose the green backdrop, introduce a larger top margin and bring MORE emphasis to the illustration (make it a major feature) At the moment the 2 are fighting for attention. On the subject of content I would avoid saying HTML and CSS are easy - particularly when dispensing advice. Producing standards based, cross browser compatible, validating code that is also pleasing on the eye is tricky at best and a catalyst for a nervous breakdown at worst. And if you don't believe me then I suggest you look at your design in IE6 (22% usage - W3Schools)

Hi aaron1uk, with such a tasty sounding brand as Hairy Lemon Hostels I think you have room to develop the aesthetics a little to really get something tasty. Since you do have both a colour and a fruit in the title I would strongly advocate echoing it more in the colour choice. If you remember when Heinz did the limited edition green tomato sauce, you will recall how wrong it seemed when tasting it, even though the ingredients were the same. All that psychology adds up and when we think of lemons we don't think of pinks and fuscia. I would throw a load of yellow in, different hues and if stuck head over to http://kuler.adobe.com/ for inspiration. It's not often web designers get to lose their minds on something as cool sounding as Hairy Lemon Hostels, so I would really consider playing with colour and illustration. Aside from that I think the conceptual plays nicely - scattered photos and notebook give it that back-packer feel. I think you're on the right track and have the potential for a great looking site.

Many thanks to everyone commenting... andymayhem I am taking on board the views about the text scrolling over the backdrop on homepage. It certainly is a valid complaint. I am not jumping to change it right now as I am reluctant to make knee jerk reactions within minutes of a launch but it certainly seems to be getting people's backs up. Webee I can never quote make my mind up on testimonials. On the one hand they seem to demonstrate some happy customers but then there's always the notion that they just got made up on the spot. In some sense it's nice to let the work do the talking and if people like it great, if not then that's life. What do others think about the idea of testimonials? LYKC Thanks for the kind words. You spot on I completely forgot my meta description which is infinitely more important than the tags. With regards tag density I had pretty much resigned my thinking to the fact they no longer carry any real wait for SEO and therefore it's academic. I stand to be corrected on the correct use and density, and value of them? Nick You seem to be of the growing number of respondents who are irritated by the fixed backdrop. It may well be one of those CSS tricks I am having a temporary love affair with and in so doing compromising usability unnecessarily. I will take it under advisement. I wanted the footer to be functional and clean for now; but do intend tarting it up a little soon. Any ideas or inspiration would be most welcome. Thanks everyone...

Thank you for your comments... Skysurge - your point is well made. It was certainly a design consideration but I felt in the end that even on a very small screen resolution the text in question is over a clear section of background. Given this and the fact the remainder of the site is built to accommodate the hectic background I traded it for aesthetic. I may switch to scrolling the homepage background if there are enough complaints. Thanks. Website Design Liverpool - Many thanks for your great comments. I am freelance, evo is my own business. I have been freelance for just over 12 months and loving it. Bluedreamer - ExpressionEngine rules!!

Hey guys... I'd appreciate any constructive comments about our new site launch. EVO Design