www.daniel-bates.com

[Daniel Bates]

Hey all,

Well, my first website is now live. With the help of a couple of web designer friends, I hand-coded pretty much the entire site (except for the Flash gallery and the contact form). Let's just say that it was a very educational experience!

C&C on the site design, colors, usability, text, and well pretty much anything would be much appreciated.

http://daniel-bates.com/

Thanks!
--Daniel

[Daniel Bates]

And yes, I know the Customers page is blank. It'll be a link to ExposureManager, probably; I'm just leaving it as a blank page for now.

[my3peas]

Looks good, very easy to navigate. I might change "customers" to "clients"--the word client just has a more professional ring, IMO :)

Congrats on going live!

[rages4calm]

Good Job Daniel :) looks very clean and works great.

[Daniel Bates]

Thanks guys!


I'll think about that... "clients" vs. "customers"... I'll probably go with "clients".

[shutterflypro]

If you are going to have pricing on your site be a little more descriptive about it.

[sharpfocus]

Very nice Daniel. I hope you make a million $. ...Bob

[Daniel Bates]

Thanks for commenting, Raymond and Bob!

I'm attempting a PHP contact form, instead of the (buggy) Perl script I am currently using. Wish me luck!

[photosbysergio]

Dainel, So far so good. Simple yet Effective. Easy to maneuver. Congrats. Looking forward to you filling up the gallery.

[chempilot]

looks good. some of the sentences did not come up on the "about" page. they did once highlighted them (i was going to cut and paste it here). but everything else worked. i'm using IE 6.0

wow...to think i knew you when you were just a TPF post whore!

[Daniel Bates]

Past tense, Carl?

[HOUSCOUS]

very nice..

[Michael Lyons]

very clean and simple

[metagore]

Nice! I really like the simple and clean layout. Navigation is consistent through all the pages.

Things that I notice that you might want to look into are:

- The corner graphics for the main content area show some jpg artifacts on some pages (about, pricing, contact, clients)

- The main content area seems to shift between pages and doesn't always left-align with the page header.

- Don't take this next part personally :) ... The site as a whole is kind of bland. The logo is nice, but it's the only thing in that top bar. The top bar could be dropped, leaving only the logo and site navigation moved to the top. This would 'fill in' the empty space and also leave you with more room for content below. While gray is a good color to use as a backdrop for images, an entirely gray site is another story. A little use of color could make the site more pleasing to look at.

In all, this is a great first website and you should definately give yourself a pat on the back for taking the time and initiative to learn how to do it.

[Daniel Bates]

Thanks, Minghao and Michael!

metagore--yeah, the corner images are going to get resized soon. The main content area is currently one of the "small bugs" that I can't seem to get fixed--the Flash gallery won't line up right, and the widths aren't always correct either.

Also, this page has errors in IE. I need somebody to look over my code and show me how to fix them... I can't even replicate the errors, which is annoying.

Do any of you get underlined nav links in Firefox?