A few of my sites

http://www.pittdesign.com - designed layout, manipulated clip art, content structure/entire site.
http://www.poetsdream.net - designed art, layout, webpage, content structure/entire site
http://www.thinkcomputers.org - designed art, but didn't make it into a webpage.

Let me know what you think please. Problems, Likes/Dislikes or Otherwise. Be sure to address which site you are talking about

My Critique(s):

Pittdesign: Of all your sites, the best one in my opion. Loads quickly, I have access to everything I would want (more info, apply now, etc.), and great summary on the index page. Very basic, but looks classy with the shaping and very easy to navigate. Best one of the three by far.

Poesdream: The colour scheme hoenstly hurts my eyes. It's hard for me to concentrate on what it is you want me to, let alone read it. As soon as the page pops up, I forget why I came here, and get lost in the colours. If this was for a customer and he/she wanted it like this I can understand it, however, it just really bothers me. The links at the top are nice with great roleover(s). Simple, yet effective. Matches the colour scheme, however just overall the colours bother me. If you're working with a CSS external sheet, you may want to try playing around with that, see if anything else meets your needs.

Finally,
Thinkcomputers.org: Many problems with this one in my opinion. First thing I noticed was the size of your page. Man, it's 60 k. With todays internet, doesn't take too long to load, but is there a need for an index homepage that is 60 k, and is 19.5 pages long (in my resolution at least)? I would say trim that down as much as you possibly could. Your navigation looks alright, but I'm not a fan of the gifs which onmouseover or hover take about half a seocnd to a second to load. Man those aggrevate me. But your navigation is still okay. Easy to use, and the integration with your logo is nice.

...2 cents
Oliver

hey, thanks for your input!

for the last site of my three, thinkcomputers.org, I just created the site in photoshop and sent it to the webmaster. He did the rest, and I must say it isn't pretty. Unnessessary tables and tags, unoptimized image files and loads of text.

I agree that for internet purposes, its slow, but I'm not concerned with that, I was hired to make the design and that's what I did. I had nothing to do with optimzing or making the actual webpage.

As for poetsdream, I can see why it would bother some people, it just takes a while to get use to. I made the color scheme work the best I could.

Im glad you like pittdesign cus this is my business. Thanks for your input

I have to agree that the first site is the best out of those three. When the "Templates" -page is viewed with Opera 7.11, there is a horozontal and vertical scroll bar for "template styles". In FF 1.0 it looks ok.

The services page works correctly with Opera, but then again with FireFox the content on the right overlays the boxes on the left. With Opera the content on the right doesn't change when browsing between "personal", "small business" and "professional". Actually, that problem occures on all pages when viewed with Opera.

The layout design is good, but cross-browser support is poor.

Great work on the first site. One small thing that annoys me: on your "portfolio" page, you have an image thumbnail set up to 110X80 resoltion. However, this is really just a shrunken verion of a larger image and is a hefty 119K. Do yourself a favor and get a real thumbnail.

I know, I use a news program for alot of the stuff on my site, i just havent been able to change it because the database got corrupted, so I have to redo all the content again when I have time... but thanks for letting me know

I have just added a few new featuers to poetsdream.net , can anyone give me the heads up and tell me if you like the new user interactive-friendly features?

any and all comments will be appreciated.

I personally think the first one is the most professional of them all, though it "kinda" loaded slow for me, the second one seemed kind of random to tell you the truth, and third one...well that's already been taken care of by onassar

can you explain what you mean by random for poetsdream? and try to be alittle more detailed.

All of the sites are pretty much the same, a collection of images chained up by tables with some of them acting as links. And frames to boot.

They all loaded very slowly for me.

I'd say the poetsdream is the most original in appearence, the other two were kind of boring.

Modern web-design isn't about creating something that looks pretty in photoshop, it's about a space for users to interact with, sure it has to be pretty, but it has to be a lot more than that to keep people returning to it.

p.s. why not make the 'webmaster' aware of such comments? otherwise you might end up getting blamed when the site doesn't perform as well as hoped.

How can I make my sites ones that people will want to come back to? Should I not use tables?

Well you shouldn't use tables in general, to make people come back, assure them that there'll be something new next time around.

on pittdesign portfoio I didn't realise you had done more than one site, it took me a moment to see the links down the side. I'd either have an index on the first page linking to individual ones or have about 10 at a time on each page