Redone my personal site - any comments?

Was just wondering what you thought of my revised site layout?

http://www.ddryhurst.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk

Things that I am aware of:

High res is crap
Splash image is a little slow
Flash site not up and running
[EDIT] Now validates with XHTML V1.0 and CSS2, Yay!

Since I've made this change does the main site still have an outline around the image?

Thanks to all who reply - all comments greeted with open mind.

It looks really nice A very clean design that looks professional. You also use graphics very well!

The only thing that I don't like is that face with the red eye.... It's kinda creepy....

in the pages that are loaded into the iframe, set the bgcolor property of the body tag to be white. i'm skinning windows, so my default bgcolor isn't white anymore, so i get a gray box in the middle of your page...

hope this helps.

wolfie - thanks for pointing that out, have added the body tag as you suggested, want to give it a try for us?

Andy - First point you made was the URL, I have registered www.myinspiration.tk - but it's only a redirector. Might look at getting a proper domain name in near future. Links don't work, I am aware of this, technical listing is not working as I am compiling it and also getting the pictures to insert into a project portfolio that will open in a javascript window. Lastly no way back to home page - do you mean the actual splash screen or the main page where I introduce what the site was about? (Apart from that, did you like the design? lol)

Thanks for all the criticism.

the font-size is way too small.
and you should be aware of the impact of using verdana as standard font,
http://www.virtuelvis.com/archives/146.html
http://www.xs4all.nl/~sbpoley/webmatters/verdana.html

i would say that the markup is pretty far from xhtml.
and you shouldn't be using tables for layout.
http://www.hotdesign.com/seybold/
http://www.webaim.org/techniques/structure/

you are also using the alt-attribute wrong. if an image is there purely for layout, just use an empty alt-text; alt=""
if you view that page in a browser that doesn't display picture you get lots of nosens text like "Image Slice n"
but the alt-text on the menuimages are correct

yeah, that bgcolor helped out. everything's white now, which is good.

i like the style, looks good.

A really pretty page. I do agree, though, that the red eyed zombie is creepy.

Lose the splash page. It is a total waste of time, adding nothing to the visitors' experience. If you want to offer a gawd help us Flash version, simply put a link on each page to it.

The font size is too small. You are aware that 9px is the minimum size that will render, right?

The code is actually closer to html3.2 tag soup than it is to xhtml. It may validate as xhtml1.0 transitional, but only because transitional allows damn near anything. Why table layout? CSS would do the job on this simple layout very easily.

Your text-as-graphics navbar is very nice and alt attributes are in place. (You don't need to say 'About me graphic link.' 'About Me' is enough—it was enough for the graphic.)

Lose the iframe. They're deprecated in xhtml anyway. They're also inaccessible, invisible to assistive technology. A fixed size div would do the same job in this case.

I've attached a Lynx screenshot. That'll give you an idea about your accessibility. Linked pages are viewable, but there is no navigation.

You've got the graphic design part solid. Just bring the coding and access parts up to grade.

cheers,

gary