Hi Matt!
Just a few suggestions...

For the Computer Services, I would suggest not having all of the type on the page in Caps. Perhaps have the services provided in caps, and the description written in the normal Upper/Lowercase form. It can be difficult to keep reading when you feel like your computer screen is yelling at you. (Although I totally get the whole all Caps thing, that is how I write. Haha) Also, to avoid having the people visiting your website continuously scroll, maybe there is a way to break down all the information. Maybe sub-pages? Or possibly accordion menus (something along those lines.)

http://www.1stwebdesigner.com/freebi...nus-tutorials/

That site has demos of what I am talking about.^^

I would also break down the information on your page titled "My recommendations". That way, people who are looking for your recommendations have more control over finding what they are looking for, rather then having to scroll until they find it. Make your website interactive!

Finally, I would suggest maybe picking 1 main font for all of your information on the website. It's not necessary, but it looks pretty and professional. If you are going to have more than one (which is def. acceptable) make sure each font has a purpose. For example; If you want Gill sans and Arial as the two fonts you use, indicate one as a "header" font and one as a "body text" font and so on.


I hope I was somewhat helpful! Good luck with your business ventures!

-C

I was suspicious the moment I navigated to another page on your site, that it was done with a wysiwyg editor of some sort. I checked and found you used iWeb.

What caused my suspicions was that all the graphics reloaded every time a new page was visited. It should not be that way. Just the body content should change without the annoying, and slow i might add reload of every element on the page. If you are happy with what you have then go with it, but the site feels cheep.

At the very least. Change the seamless tile you are using for the background texture. The repetition is glaringly obvious. A good seamless tile should be larger so the repeat is not as noticeable, or have such a subtle pattern that you can not see the repeat.

Hey Matt, congrats on almost being done with your degree!

Now for the Design of Your Current Site

- Is there a specific reason why the menu at the top is written in javascript outside of it just being something iWeb generated? I have javascript blocked on my browser for security reasons and as a test to see how my site designs work with limitations. With javascript turned off, the menu on your site did not function at all.

- Pick one typeface for your headings and one typeface for your body text and stick to them. You have a serif typeface for some pages and a sans-serif typeface for other pages, you have all-caps for one page, and bold type for one, non-bold for another, and there seems to be at least three different typefaces used for the body text. And your "My Recommendations" page is outputting text as an image which makes it harder for your visitors to highlight, copy, and search.

- Your site primarily reminds me of a hobby or personal website right now. It's not immediately apparent to me while browsing the site that you're a business and that I should purchase services from you. And part of this could be because the site is hosted on a free host, doesn't have a domain name, and doesn't have a brand or logo readily associated with it, the information about your services that are on the site is a bit vague and you're missing a link for customers to contact you on your Photography lessons page.

On Selling Stuff With Your Site

- There are a couple of major concerns I have with you starting to sell things on your site itself. The free webhost you have right now (comxa) is rated somewhat poorly on spamlists because of some of the sites that they host were engaged in malicious activity (your site itself is fine and comxa, as far as I know, is fine). If you were to start selling products using your website, my suggestion would be to distance yourself from comxa and any sort of free hosting. Get your own domain name and your own hosting service as soon as possible, and do some research into transaction security to keep your visitors and customers safe when they purchase things from you.

- If you do want to set up a webstore and don't have any coding experience, I suggest looking into shopping cart systems like Magento Community or even Content Management Systems with ecommerce plugins like any of the big three (Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla). Wordpress would be the easiest to pick up and go with in my opinion. And you don't necessarily need to know how to develop a website to use a CMS.

- Or if you don't want to deal with people buying directly from your site and the security issues you'd have to address with that, you could list your products and ask people to email you if they want to buy. It's not streamlined, it's not pretty, and it's a pain to upkeep, but it would work in the interim and sidestep some of the issues with your hosting and lack of a shopping cart system.

I would also only center align text if its a few lines. Not whole paragraphs like you did on 1 or 2 pages. On my computer, the page you are on is highlighted in dark color and dissappears. I turn my brightness down on my screen, but others will too. Making the navigation text a little bigger at top would help too for ease of navigating. Some headers on services page need to stand out with more space and make them larger.

pretty decently laid out site to be honest Mathew, or Matt whatever you would like to be known as.. In my opinion, its very neat and clean website, that's the best about it, however you could also add some elegant colors to make it impressive, maybe you should have chosen better template

good luck with the rest of it!

Hi
I like the simple clean layout i like the choice of colors.
i would drop the page counter as i think there tacky.
i would change the email link to a php mailto: contact form pretty simple to setup.
and i would use ajax to load content into your rather then refreshing every time.

Hi Matt,

Well effort but I believe there is more you could build on your website to make it look better and perfect.

You can take a look an example that we build for our client, *removed link - advertising not allowed* for more information.

Hope you would get it right.