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I have, thanks!!!

Hi TheLilly,

I'm not a designer much anymore, but I can help you out on the functionality aspects of your site.

• The logo, at least on my screen, is coming out of the box that is contained in, it looks like you've padded it too much to the left.
• Is there any reason that the slider at the top has so much white-space? There's a good 200px between where the top of the logo box is and where the top of the slider is.
• The background you have only fills the viewport, there's a definitive line when you scroll down where the background gradient ends and gives way to white.
• Your drop-down menu also spills out of the box when you are hovering over it, there is too much padding at the bottom.
• The quick links need to target a new browser when you click them. If I'm looking at a site and I click a link, I don't want to have to hit back in my browser to get to where I was, I want to check that site out and then close that window and go back to the site I was on.
• I feel that your scrollbar for the content is unnecessary - it hides when you aren't in the box which I feel is counter-intuitive, the page is bigger than the view-port anwyay (at least from where I am) hence forcing the content into such a small box isn't required?
• Regards the responsive design, great for having a go at it as that's where development and design is headed for websites, but you have to make sure that it works properly. When I resize my browser, the content does shrink, etc, but not in a way that it should. It seems to be broken at tablet size (the menu bar drops down, again, for me at least).
• Furthermore, going back to the content box scrollbar, on the mobile site, you have a scrollbar for the content box and a scrollbar for the page, which isn't going to work too great. Also, as the scrollbar hides it won't be clear on a mobile there is more content there as hover effects clearly don't work on mobile browsers.

I think you need to leave the design for the moment as the site doesn't work as it should. You really need to test this site on different browsers, operating systems, phones and tablets to make sure that it works uniformly.

Client wants all the content to fit on the screen without having users scroll down, yet some of the content is long. It's probably a good idea to kill it!

I am aware of some of the issues with the responsive scaling.

Thanks for the feedback.

Welcome to the world of graphic design, where design direction changes with the wind.
You need to remotivate yourself in a different direction. Suck it up and do it. If you view it as a game, there is no need to feel any extra pressure. And surely with the redesign, your contract allows for change orders for additional work. Another reason to feel happy.

As for the website link we can critique it but we won't do your work for you. Unless you want to pay us.

What you have is a start. For me the links were working. The copy not so much. But I'm sure it means something to someone who might be in their industry or looking for something they are offering. Just not sure what that is.

Hey there,

I've started reworking the design and remotivating myself. Yes my contract allows major changes to be charged extra, but he's guilt tripping me, threatening me and saying mean things because the initial deadline was missed (because he supplied the content late) and there was a little problem with the scaling of the slideshow though that was fixed within a day. I really don't feel like fighting and involving lawyers and judges. I just wanna finish and move on.

I think what PrintDriver says is true, this is what business is. Clients constantly push the limits to see what they can get away with in regards to getting things done.

I'm a relative novice in handling clients compared to some in this forum, but I want to share my thoughts on this client anyways.

I think you need to ask yourself a few vital questions about this project. We don't discuss pricing here so keep the answers to these to yourself, but..

• How much are you being paid for this project?
• Is there a lot of potential for repeat business from this client?
• Adding to the point above, are you likely to want to do any more work for this client in the future?
• Is the client likely to always be late paying, supplying content and keeping up their end of the contractual obligations?

You obviously need to do as much as possible for the client, but you also have to stand firm and draw the line somewhere.

Do you have written proof of his approval of one design? If so then you are allowed to charge him more, as thats a new design which is built after approval.

It sounds to me like this client is taking up too much of your time and ultimately sounds to me like a complete arse. Personally, I'd drop this client and find new ones.

I'm not sure completely on Intellectual Property rights here, but if he has paid you for some of the work, release your source code to him and move on. If he hasnt paid you for anything, keep your source code and tell him to move on and find someone else.

I'd wait for someone elses opinion here though, as like I say, relative to others here I'm a newbie, so I might be talking rubbish!

Advice like that is usually prefaced with
<not a lawyer>
Is this site live?
Does your client check his logs?

Having the double scrollbar is not the way to go.

For one thing, your client is probably basing it on the size of their monitors, whereas this can vary. For someone with a larger monitor, they're going to have a huge amount of whitespace below this scrollable text box.

Its just more work for the user who wants to read your sites content, and its terrible for accessibility as well.

The other problem is that it isnt clear that the box is scrollable until you move your mouse over it. Otherwise, it just looks like the text is cut off, and appears broken. Not a great first impression.

If the content is too long, then you need to consider how your it is organised. Break it up into smaller pages, rewrite it so its more condensed, or evaluate whether it needs to be there at all.

Personally, I would find Word Press very limiting. I know they have become very popular and are more versatile than they used to be, but at the end of the day WordPress was intended to be used for blog sites and just doesn't offer the robust capabilities you will find with coding in HTML. You can always throw in some php and javascript to add some bells and whistles while keeping the code lightweight and the entire site search engine friendly.

Robust sites are created with wordpress and other content management systems if people understand how to customize the set up of themes. You have to understand the backend code not just html.

this is what I got when I was trying to visit your site