May 19, 200917 yr Hello People, I am new to this forum, I have been learning standard compliant xhtml and css for the past five weeks and would like some initial feedback on my portfolio website that i have been building. www.marcbinns.co.uk The above url is my website which is cross browser compatible in all of the major browsers including IE.6 and because its been coded fairly well i'd say its even viewable in IE5.5!! I have even scored top in the indexing for googles indexing for the 'marc binns' search . (Feel free to leave some feedback for me it would be much appreciated! any info on typography/design would be great!) MARC[/b]
May 19, 200917 yr nice site, but I'm not sure about the downloadable cv on it. Do you really want everybody to have your home address, mobile numbers etc?
May 19, 200917 yr Author nice site, but I'm not sure about the downloadable cv on it. Do you really want everybody to have your home address, mobile numbers etc? Hey thanks for the reply, thats a very good point!! i'll remove my contact details now, I didn't think of that. I forgot to point out the site is a work in progress at the moment...a few pages not been completed and also my CV is down for the time being.
May 19, 200917 yr Hi Marc, Just had a quick squiz... I'd like to see a little more colour (a black and white layout can be really lifted by the occasional carefully-chosen bit of colour). I also don't like your font choices - both the main article body text (Times New Roman I assume?) and in particular the menu and sidebar header font (Cooper I think) - it looks a bit girly and out of place... Mind you, as forum regulars will know, I have a bit of a downer on serif fonts in general! What I do like is your markup - very clean and semantic.
May 19, 200917 yr Author Hi Marc, Just had a quick squiz... I'd like to see a little more colour (a black and white layout can be really lifted by the occasional carefully-chosen bit of colour). I also don't like your font choices - both the main article body text (Times New Roman I assume?) and in particular the menu and sidebar header font (Cooper I think) - it looks a bit girly and out of place... Mind you, as forum regulars will know, I have a bit of a downer on serif fonts in general! What I do like is your markup - very clean and semantic. @Zigpress Hey, Thanks for taking alook, always good to get the feedback from people who have alot more experience than myself on various things. I do agree with the font I don't really like it, I did spend about an hour going through various fonts and couldn't find one I liked....The colour I know its abit bland it was sort of my intention it was the mood I was in for awhile but it definatley needs a change lol...the markup was what I wanted to work at its tableless and what html and css are there for lol! Much appreciated.....can you recommend any good php beginner level books? Marc
May 19, 200917 yr Just have a play with php and see what you can do. tizag.com is good. just try some tutorials and try and customose them. that's the way i learnt As for your site, i think it looks good. maybe some colour and a different header image? you on there is fine but the other bit im not sure about. maybe not the border round the edge? :)james.
May 19, 200917 yr +1 for tutorials. I never used books to learn PHP (though I have a few ebooks around for reference) - I just found a couple of noddy tutorials and then started downloading simple classes from phpclasses.org to see how they ticked. And of course http://www.php.net/manual/en/ is the definitive reference once you get going.
May 19, 200917 yr When I started with PHP I used Prentice Hall Practical PHP and MySQL. It was a great start, but I never worked all the way through it. Part way through I decided to write my own script and learn practically. I was able to use examples from the book, from the PHP Manual mentioned by ZigPress and just Googling the rest of it. After coding a few sites and scripts I automatically felt more comfortable with it and had built a library of code that I could refer to when I had to create a site for a client.
May 19, 200917 yr Author Just have a play with php and see what you can do. tizag.com is good. just try some tutorials and try and customose them. that's the way i learnt As for your site, i think it looks good. maybe some colour and a different header image? you on there is fine but the other bit im not sure about. maybe not the border round the edge? :)james. @ JAMES Hey thanks for the reply, it is lacking colour somewhat, I reakon the general impression is to add a little colour even if subtle! with regards to the header I sort of like it but I am going to re -design the site entirely within the upcoming month of or so, so I will definatley be working on a cool header soon..... @ JAMES,zigpress & Mr Brightside PHP- Thanks for the tips I have a pretty good handle on html and css, my php knowledge is very limited only covered it briefly in uni but its something I'm definatley going to be learning next so will definatley look at your recommendations! Thanks for the comments!
May 20, 200917 yr Site layout is quite good but I agree it need some more colour. As for PHP books, this one is pretty good: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Sams-Teach-Yoursel...800&sr=1-15 It has excellent tutorials to guide you through how to create online shops, forums etc.
May 20, 200917 yr Try changing the header fonts. They look a bit clumsy and bloated. I like the black&white idea, but it's way overdone. My eyes got bored. I need some juicy eyecnady to focus on, otherwise my mind wanders back to the SCREAMING.
May 20, 200917 yr Author Try changing the header fonts. They look a bit clumsy and bloated. I like the black&white idea, but it's way overdone. My eyes got bored. I need some juicy eyecnady to focus on, otherwise my mind wanders back to the SCREAMING. Hey...thanks for the reply, I will add some colour...also going to change the font to a more friendly one.
May 20, 200917 yr Author Site layout is quite good but I agree it need some more colour. As for PHP books, this one is pretty good: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Sams-Teach-Yoursel...800&sr=1-15 It has excellent tutorials to guide you through how to create online shops, forums etc. @highway7 Hey, Thanks for the comments, definatley going to add some colour when I get round to editing it...php suggesstion- thanks for that will take alook. Marc
May 20, 200917 yr Hey there, here's some thought on your site. "An Informal Greeting" is a very contradictory title. It sounds very... formal, in my opinion! But the first thing I noticed was the page's title. Having "Home Page" makes it sound very formal too. "Marc Binn's personal website" on the other hand sounds a lot friendlier. On to the About page, how about "About me | Marc Binns"; it is obvious by then that this is your personal website (and anyone looking you up on a search engine will probably see the About page right under the home page, which already says this is your personal site). What I suggest is turning this from a corporate-talk to a person-talk. Friendliness and professionalism can work together. I saw that you used one stylesheet for every page, plus one for the "base". This is bad practise as in the end, users have to download several files instead of just one. The page loading time suffers from that. You may want to group them all into one single style sheet. Next I noticed the header image which screams "I'm a JPG!" instead of "Welcome!". That's something you may want to look into. I also agree on the font size, it's a bit too big to my liking. Good beginning, but I don't feel like the site is done yet. Keep it up!
May 20, 200917 yr Author Hey there, here's some thought on your site."An Informal Greeting" is a very contradictory title. It sounds very... formal, in my opinion! But the first thing I noticed was the page's title. Having "Home Page" makes it sound very formal too. "Marc Binn's personal website" on the other hand sounds a lot friendlier. On to the About page, how about "About me | Marc Binns"; it is obvious by then that this is your personal website (and anyone looking you up on a search engine will probably see the About page right under the home page, which already says this is your personal site). What I suggest is turning this from a corporate-talk to a person-talk. Friendliness and professionalism can work together. I saw that you used one stylesheet for every page, plus one for the "base". This is bad practise as in the end, users have to download several files instead of just one. The page loading time suffers from that. You may want to group them all into one single style sheet. Next I noticed the header image which screams "I'm a JPG!" instead of "Welcome!". That's something you may want to look into. I also agree on the font size, it's a bit too big to my liking. Good beginning, but I don't feel like the site is done yet. Keep it up! Hey there, Some very good points!! it's still early days for me as ive only been learning and building my site for the past 5 weeks or so.... Still got a long way to go before I get to a decent level! I agree it is very formal, which defeats the heading! I'll take your tips on board and change that because I totally agree....the style sheets comment you made is also a very good one its bad practice, but because the style sheets are very small anwyay and the site is fairly simple and small in size I dont think load times will be greatly affected but I am going to make it into just one style sheet. Finallly, the site is far from complete, I'm not really intending the website to be seen by employers until after I have finished university which is about a year and a half away... so got alot of time to get some more learning done and work on this site and make it into a finished product. Thanks very much for the comments though I've taken them on board! Marc
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