First Steps In Web design

Eyeofbuddha

Hi guys. This is my first website which I designed and coded for my current employer, after teaching myself the basics of XHTML, CSS, and Photoshop.
Looking forward to your comments!
http://www.zweton.com

wba88

maybe change
'Why not checking our new exciting dishes to take away?'
to
'Why not check out our new exciting dishes to take away?'

looks good though

Dave!

Pretty slick, well done for your first attempt!

I'm on my 6th or 7th site and they still look sh*te

DonkeyStyle \o/

wba88 wrote:

maybe change
'Why not checking our new exciting dishes to take away?'
to
'Why not check out our new exciting dishes to take away?'

No way man, I like it... it's delightfully engrish

Adam

Very nice for a first effort indeed, better than many 10th attempts out there!

Some pointers:

I don't like the fact that the home page nav is image rollovers and the other pages aren't.

Also, the nav images seem a bit rough around the edges of the text, maybe up the quality a bit on them?

I'm a fan on using grey text for nice blended effect but the left hand side navigation on the menus pages is just a bit too light and almost missable.

Use consistent fonts! The index page, about us, and contacts use three different fonts for the body of text, it looks inconsistent and is irritating. The font on the about us page is the most fitting in my opinion for the whole site.



Thats all I can see for now, but as I said, very nice job overall. Merry Christmas!

Ruu_Old

You've done really well. I must start web design again, its been..over 4 years since I done something. Fair play to ya OP, credit where its due.

Goodshape

Mirror wrote:

Also, the nav images seem a bit rough around the edges of the text, maybe up the quality a bit on them?

The nav bar seems to be just text, no images, unless we're talking about different things.

The site looks great, anyway, but the navigation gets confusing. Even if the header graphics are different, I think think the menu items should stay in the same place throughout the site. I click into any of the options on the front page and I'm lost, the menu isn't under my cursor anymore.

Also, I think there's room to fit all five menu items on the horizontal list, swapping them around just adds to the confusion and there's no harm in having a link to 'about us' on the 'about us' page - keep the menus consistent.

Aside from that I like it. Nice, simple and elegant, no fuss, gives you the information you need.

Adam

You're right, sorry, its just text! Maybe its my eyes then... does the text look a bit rough around the edges to anyone else??

Goodshape

It looks fine to me. Not amazingly photoshoptasticly smooth or anything but I like the simplicity of it, and you couldn't get those rollover loading times using graphics.

Eyeofbuddha

Thank you lads for your constructive comments! Forgive my "engrish"... As you would have guessed English isn't my first language -I'm French. The navigation bar of the homepage uses a simple CSS background color change. I will definitely address the font issue. I start to realize that the whole site lacks in consistency between the index page and the rest of the site ( got previously quite a lot of comments about this very point) and intend to rethink the design of the headers of the entire website probably based on the one of the homepage . Thanks a lot for the compliments anyway!

Seth Brundle

It looks good.
I would change the link structure: the locations link brings you to /locations/locations.html whereas I would have saved the actual file as index.html so that the user just needs /locations. This applies to all links.

Stick something into the disclaimer about not using any email addresses collected for spam etc.

Eyeofbuddha

Hi guys, just made a few changes. Added the text links to the location pages, as the statistics showed that a huge percentage of users were actually missing the links from the map ( I made the "click" of the text bold as well...) Changed the font of the homepage so the main text of all pages uses a Verdana Font and a justified alignment, sizes and line heights are still different though, don't really know if I should change the ones of the About Us page to make the text more readable. I haven't redesigned the headers of the website yet( even though I realize that the inconsistency between the headers of the index page and the rest of the site is the most obvious flaw of my design) and don't think I'm feeling brave enough to do it just now ( am getting a bit sick of this project after so many hours spent on it- is it something you've experienced?...) Thanks again for your very helpful suggestions!

Bob the Builder

What scares me the most about this website is that, on your first attempt(or so you say ), every single bit of code that i checked for errors has come out 100% clean(eg. Css, HTML, Links). Good Job OP!

caff

Its a nice clean site, good job

Just one thing, the site-map page appears to stretch a bit, maybe try instead of just one inline list to divide it into two lists side by side

listone listtwo
stuff stuff

Eyeofbuddha

Well actually nevf the code isn't that clean, there are 1 or 2 minor errors which I will keep secret and fix whenever I get a chance... But I think it is quite easy to come up with a clean code when you've got so many free tools at your disposal to check your HTML and CSS.