Advice for beginner!

neon_glows

Im totaly new to web design, i managed to bang this out, its version v2.0 of my website, the last version was terrible and like a disaster piece but heres the new version, im still looking for ways to improve it though!

www.theirishsurfer.com

neon_glows

Oh and be honest, if the site is rubbish tell me, lol, be blunt i want/need to know!

galactus

I like the overall feel of the site (get rid of the black background though), looks
like there's a lot of good content. Graphics are good quality.

You're not using style sheets. Also why the splash screen?

dangerman

Hey neon_glow, not bad at all for a beginner!

Loads of good content which is key - content is king.


There are however, a few issues with layout when I view the site in firefox. Some of the tables are a bit out of place on various pages. Best to have a look at it in firefox yourself.
http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/

There's scroll bars around the shoutbox thing, which make it look a bit messy.

Also



Did you do this logo?

Cause I like it. The problem with it is that you keep using the img tags to resize it - this is bad practice as it makes it look blurred and pixelated, make different sized versions of it for where you're using it at different sizes so it always looks sharp. And why isn't this logo used in the banner at the top? It's cool!

Ph3n0m

1. Couldnt read the text at the bottom, that says

"Site design and content by Nicky Butler in association with the ISA and help from third partys all information is © of www.isasurf.ie and www.theirishsurfer.com. Logo by www.oncore.us and web storage by ezri.mine.nu. "

2. Webcams - irishsurfer logo is mis-placed, bottom ads are squished

3. Suggest you look at the dynamic menus, that way you can categorise links instead of having a large list of them

4. Dont include pages that have nothing on them, if they are blank, get rid of them - you can always add them in later

5. News - resize the images, they are too big and align them to the right - and space out each article from the next

6. Gallery - looks completely off skew

7. General - put some space between your nav and the text in the main content area - looks very tight

8. Increase the general width of the site - its keeps popping when you reference external pages, such as the shop, etc

9. http://www.nicky.eatpie.info/surfer/ - pointless splash page as it doesnt have all the links that are in the main site - suggest your re-direct goes straight to the main site.

10. Also if there is going to be loads of content on the site, you should have a look around at Content Management Systems, or ask for recommendations for easy to use ones for beginnners like yourself.

Thats it at a quick glance - oh and also look at it getting the site validated through http://validator.w3.org

JustHalf

neon_glows
For a beginner, that's quite good. Well done.

You should think about getting the book "Creating a Web Page With HTML, Visual QuickProject Guide". I haven't read it, but it comes highly recommended:

http://www.zeldman.com/daily/0804d.shtml#virgin
http://www.digital-web.com/articles/creating_a_web_page_with_html/

Here's the amazon.co.uk link for it: Creating a Web Page With HTML, Visual QuickProject Guide.

DJB

Did anyone mention the font face?

Change it to something like Tahoma, Verdana, Arial... around 10-12px.

Easier to read on screen then times!

Dave

nahdoic

Get the mouseover to work better by having the "onmouseover" button already cached in the users' browser. So when you put your mouse cursor over it for the first time it loads instantly - and doesn't take 5 seconds for the mouseover image to appear.

You can do it by adding the image names to the javascript code like

image1 = new Image();
image1.src = "images/mouse-over-button.gif";

neon_glows

Thanks alot guys for the help, im going to work on it over midterm on my ****ty laptop (hope it dont blow up) as i will be out at sea, once again, cheers!