My First Professional Design: Www.artbyjfrances.com

[Saint_Michael 3]

Well as some of you are aware that I got my first website design gig about 3 months ago and on the verge of finishing it after my client decided to stop the designing of the ecommerce section of the website. Which is a blessing because outside of setting up a cart and doing coding here and there I have no clue about the finance part of ecommerce.

 

To start off I did not choose the hosting site so sorry Xisto - Web Hosting , second the admin panel is horrible and very limited what you can do as well, 1 MySQL DB (50Mb), does not allow CHMODing through FTP software, FTP software is very limited (had to use CUTEFTP bleh, Windows hosting, limited on the php scripts I could use(none), etc etc etc. The only reason they went with the hosting become of the ecommerce thing, the support was great though I give them that. Also for some reason the hosting hates firefox, so if you see no images just do a refresh and yes I spent countless hours on how to fix this, yet nothing, any suggestions would help and maybe give me an idea where to go with it.

 

Now my rant is over I can go on to the site which is called Art By J Frances.

 

I will tell you this that it is a gallery site/e-commerce site (postpone for now) that I spent a total of 48 hours of designing, testing things out and other stuff and I am proud of this design. I used several scripts that focus on images such as the light script, and a reflection script which worked wonders and impressed the client as well. Also the colors I used are awesome as well especially the yellow on the blue that I used. I might go into some simple php scripts that don't require MySQL, which is not alot but I can think of something though. also it is 100% valid except for the embed source tag and talk to truefusion about it earlier so when I get the time I mess with it and see what happens to make it not error out on me.

 

So it's opinion time, I know a lot of people are waiting for me to showcase my design and try their hardest to bash my design, good luck .

 

Also for idea's how to focus on the images as well without over doing it to much.

 

Update #1: Thanks haslip the object set up works, had to do a little tinkering to get the width and height right but it works, and the center does look better but you can notice though its off center. Reason being is that for some strange reason the z-index I have is not going over the flash file, I might have to add something to fix that. I also did a speed report and I am fairly please with the speed of the site.

 

Update #2: Well the preload script seems to be working so their shouldn't be any flicker anywhere.

Edited December 1, 2007 by Saint_Michael (see edit history)

[jlhaslip 4]

Very Nicely done. Crisp, clean, the Art is the Focus of the site and is presented very well...

Couple of things to consider:

center the Navbar : http://www.cssplay.co.uk/menus/centered.html
add some contrast to the dateline. Hard for us old guys to read.
add Meta Tags to help with the site being Indexed better?
Is the site submitted to DMOZ, Google, etc?
the bottom Gallery Menu 'flickers' on-hover'. Any way to stop that?

Overall, quite a nice site, well nicely done.

[Saint_Michael 3]

Well I won't be dealing with the SEO aspect of the site directly but most likely I be getting together with the person who will be implementing the SEO, and maybe pick up a few things here and there to remember. Well I would say for the most part the mav was tricky to set up because of the way its coded, I was thinking about setting it up like that but was concerned with other things at the time. Most likely I will add it to my list of other cosmetics after it gets looked over again, and thanks for the flash site thats what I needed to get rid of that stupid little error.With the Menu the flick has to do with the hosting and not picking up the images correctly I was thinking of doing a image preload to fix it, but I might have to look for another method of doing the menu to kill it off. As wit hte date you wouldn't even believe this if I told you but it supposed to be white, but for some reason where I have the date it got the grey color, but I might move it to the footer to fix that error.

[mahirharoon 0]

hello the website isn't soooooo professional

[Saint_Michael 3]

Well kind member there are different levels of professional but you haven't gone into details why it isn't professional, and so I am assuming that it is design. That case you need to think outside the box and not pay attention to the fads that are being used and remember designers build to the specs of the client and not to the designer, and so it doesn't need to be fancy with flash, hundreds of scripts, forums and stuff like. Simplicity is what a professional design is all about. Luckily for you a version two will be coming in the near future but for now the website does what it supposed to do.So hopefully you can expand on your post and say why it isn't professional.However, the way I used professional design is that I got paid for it, yeah I could go nuts with the design and make it look uber looking but thats not how it work, plus if you read my first post I was limited to what I could do as well.

Edited December 1, 2007 by Saint_Michael (see edit history)

[elaks 0]

hello the website isn't soooooo professional

It's medium professionalism for an art site and highly professional for a personal site.

Saint Michael, I think this is a great use of simple design. Usually I find myself struggling to differentiate between the artists work and the work of the web designer. You however have managed to make navigation and layout so simple that the art stands out from everything on the page, the first thing my eyes are drawn to on the page is the moving picture slideshow.

Two points though. I think the logo would do nicely if it wasn't covered up so much by the artists quote. If you made it about 9px font and aligned it to the right the user would be able to appreciate the art in the background.
Another point is the bottom navigation. I'd darken the images and use a low opacity, white font rather than a slightly garish yellow. Apart from that it's fine- I'm using Firefox and I can't see Jlhaslip's flickering when I hover.

Good job again- I'm supposed to be designing my church's website at the moment and I know what it's like trying to make a clear design with a short amount of time and strict guidelines.

[Timccc 0]

Nice Site Bro!!

[delivi 0]

the site looks very professional and the coding is very neat. I loved it. Great work dome saint Michael :PYou'll need to concentrate a little bit on making the site look the same in all browsers. This site looks great and as you intented it to be in Firefox and IE7, but in IE6 a few elements appear out of position.So far I've seen that nearly 50% of people are still using IE6 so you need to design by keeping them in the mind.Just add the necessary css codings for IE6 and use the IE condtional statements to include them so that your site will look the same in all browsers.

[thanveer 0]

Great

[jersey 0]

the site is really great, it's simple and clean. Nice Works man...

[Saint_Michael 3]

Ug and I don't even have access to a computer that has IE6 installed on it either so I won't even know what to fix, well at least I will have somewhat of an idea what to fix with a ie6 viewer website . thanks del, dumb IE.

[craz 0]

great job man, "awesome" :PGood luck in the future.

[indrazam 0]

great work... great menu and good layout - its not very common you see a valid xhtml site on the net nowadays (especially from a first time professional website)!And i like the slide show. Great work

[Rikusuke 0]

The site is really good but it needs a lot of work to be professional. If you center the navigation bar a bit it would look a lot better.

[anachro 0]

I like that. Initially I screamed BLAH! but it looks nice, although you should make a custom header because the blue that is the same as the header just looks bad (in my opinion), otherwise GREAT!