Hi all

I'm just setting up business on my own (no friends!)this is the first website I have designed, built and hopefully optimised all by myself. Please criticise in a gentle, puppy dog style.

www.lefthand-marketing.co.uk

cheers

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The sign "no dogs except guide dogs" who's benefit is this for?

www.lefthand-marketing.co.uk

Strictly from a design standpoint, there are only a couple things I would puppydog gently suggest.

The first is to "soften" the contrast a bit. Maybe a slightly off white bg such as #fffff1 with a text color that's a step down from stark black. Black on white is just a bit harsh with very little color anywhere else on the page to speak of. One thing I did notice in the css is that you call an image as a background but it isn't appearing, at least not that I could find by right clicking around your page. I tried hunting for it and got a 404. This could also be why IE seems to be showing a pale gray (my default bg color in IE) instead of the white I see in FF (which also shows your header image as a white rectangular block against that pale gray.) I don't know what the intention was here, so . . .

The second thing is to make it easier on your surfers by repeating the navigation down in the footer, so they don't have to scroll back up after they've read your whole page.

Page holds up well with text and window resizing, and you are GREEN on validation of both html and css-- congrats!

I'll leave the SEO stuff to others to comment on.

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Custom WordPress Themes, CubeCart templates, ModX templates, Movable Type templates. ~ B1tchslappin Political Blog ~ GreenSpeak Community Action

I'm also not sure why you've opted to pop a table in the middle of your code...it really doesn't need to be there, especially considering most of the other code is styled by seperate css.

And although I respect the whole no-frills approach to web design, especially in the field of SEO, ur site's pretty bland. all it needs is just a little splash of colour to set it off.

Best of luck...

Thanks for the comments so far, I think I've sorted the colour issue, I didn't notice it on my cheap tft's. I'm just working on keeping the validation when I take the tables out, WC3 doesn't like it!

I also like bland...

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The sign "no dogs except guide dogs" who's benefit is this for?

www.lefthand-marketing.co.uk

OK - now its got some colour, no tables (well one in the contact form) just divs and css - and didn't I have fun when FF decided to open up huge gaps between the divs...

Many many hours of research later and all is well in the world (at least my little bit) and the code is nearly ready for XHTML strict validation!

Thanks for the comments everyone!

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The sign "no dogs except guide dogs" who's benefit is this for?

www.lefthand-marketing.co.uk

Color looks good!

Just a couple comments. That hover effect of going from regular text to bold text is disturbing since things shift around when the size of the text increases to bold. Also, though you did add a link to go to the top of the page, it would really be better if you repeated the navigation down below or at the very least named the link "up to navigation" so people know what it's there for. There's a lot of text on that page and the navigation isn't visible from the bottom.

It's coming along!

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Custom WordPress Themes, CubeCart templates, ModX templates, Movable Type templates. ~ B1tchslappin Political Blog ~ GreenSpeak Community Action