I am a budding web designer on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. I am also looking for some employment in this field. I have been running this site for a year and a half. Actually, it was a final project in a class that I enjoyed and continued just to gain experience. Do I have a future in this field or should I look for something else to do.
Regards
Roger
http://www.kittyhawkfreepress.com/index.htm

I do not think you have to look for something else. You will have to distinguish between HTML coding and Web design. The site needs some layout, usability, information, and aesthetic design improvements. None of this has to do specifically with code, but rather what the user sees.

Start with a basic liquid layout tutorial. This one is good because it talks about setting up a layout grid. Even before that you'll have to figure out basic news ideas like departments, and giving some stories priority over others. This way it doesn't scroll endlessly and have all that junk on either side. Right now the site is annoying and distracting. ...all web coding and not enough web designing.

The site need basic design skills applied to it. Look at any small town news layout and you'll start to get ideas. Scan five or ten, and build up an understanding of good layout and aesthetic design technique.

Well, it's better than my first website I can tell you that. At least you didn't use flaming text :) You have got some cheesy animated gifs happening there so we'll just have to ignore those...That's a long scrolling page you have there. As the site grows you may want to break it up into more readable and navigable sections? You have some clunky old code under the bonnet. I would change the font tag (which has been deprecated BTW - which means it's been officially given it's marching orders and will be obsolete...one day when they get around to banning it)from this:

face="Century Gothic, Verdana, Times New Roman"

to:

face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"

That's presuming you want to specify a sans-serif font. You should always give a generic or default font family at the end eg: serif, sans-serif or even monospaced. HTH.

__________________
PAUL - SkyRocket Design Co
web design sydney northern beaches

Just the polish missing in my opinion. Needs consistency and a better planned navigational model.

__________________
http://www.withinthering.com/images/WITR_LOGO.gif

Hi Roger,
Just gone through your site, It took ages for your pictures to download so I would suggest a crusher for ya pictures, a crusher is a program that helps to decress the amout of bits so been it loads quicker, but apart from that its look cool boss, and your art gallery with its pictures is very inpressive. Just the loading time of ya site is the probs roger.
cool keep it up.

__________________
Site Search UK Plus >> Please Review My Site http://www.barrettsnet.co.uk

I would have to agree with the others. The information and HTML is there but it needs a finshed look to it. You may want to add CSS to your arsenal of programming and take a look at other successfull sites and work on the layout.

I definitly think that a career in web design is an option for you. Just keep goin'.

-Ben