Feedback on portfolio site

Hi gang,

Me again! I'm looking for positive and constructive feedback on my latest portfolio design. It's still to be fully populated with all the details for every job I've done, but there's enough on there to get a gist for what it's about.

www.osmith.co.uk

Thanks!

Oliver

The bit on the front page with the images, will they just be images of the locations / businesses or will they be images of the designs?

Also on the blog, well, the cutenews branding isn't great. You could rewrite the layout to be a wordpress theme which does have the added benefit of making updating the pages easier and gives you some experience with making wordpress themes which can be helpful as many businesses will want a basic CMS for their websites with more "oomph" than cutenews.

Also the first thing a prospective client (A serious one at least) is going to do is shove your website into a W3C standards compliance checker, you want to make sure that you're compliant when ever you've got your doctype fully sorted out. Especially since some tags aren't nested properly.

Also don't stick your phone number on the website, give out via email.

Oh and on your navigation you're firm on the red hover, whereas on the homepage images the hover colour changes, may be it would be an idea to make the red consistent.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Chippiewill

The bit on the front page with the images, will they just be images of the locations / businesses or will they be images of the designs?

Also on the blog, well, the cutenews branding isn't great. You could rewrite the layout to be a wordpress theme which does have the added benefit of making updating the pages easier and gives you some experience with making wordpress themes which can be helpful as many businesses will want a basic CMS for their websites with more "oomph" than cutenews.

Also the first thing a prospective client (A serious one at least) is going to do is shove your website into a W3C standards compliance checker, you want to make sure that you're compliant when ever you've got your doctype fully sorted out. Especially since some tags aren't nested properly.

Also don't stick your phone number on the website, give out via email.

Oh and on your navigation you're firm on the red hover, whereas on the homepage images the hover colour changes, may be it would be an idea to make the red consistent.

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Hi,

Thanks for the feedback.

The images will be related to the design, those images are just place holders currently, the real test is whether the hover idea works for them.

I'm deciding whether to pay for cutenews license to remove that branding. I can code and have coded wordpress sites previously, but have always been more comfortable editing by hand, so wanting to keep the CMS to a minimum (at least for my personal site).

I didn't mention in OP that everything is still in line because I haven't gone through to clean it up yet. Whoops! That's how I design, I'll code it messily so that it works and then clean up after.

I was completely torn about that myself. I don't want the red to get boring though. I was considering making the nav hovers different colours but it looked too messy. The colours that the images hover with is the main colour in the colour scheme for that client, which will become more apparent once the ful details of jobs are on.

Thanks again for you feedback :)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Pawf

I'm deciding whether to pay for cutenews license to remove that branding. I can code and have coded wordpress sites previously, but have always been more comfortable editing by hand, so wanting to keep the CMS to a minimum (at least for my personal site).

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You could make a ten minute user system with a news submission and edit form, it's not actually very difficult if you don't have to implement permissions, groups, shortstory/longstory and categories - in-house and you can use it as an example of your coding ability.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Pawf

The colours that the images hover with is the main colour in the colour scheme for that client, which will become more apparent once the ful details of jobs are on.

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If it relates to the design's colour scheme then I would stick to that.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Chippiewill

You could make a ten minute user system with a news submission and edit form, it's not actually very difficult if you don't have to implement permissions, groups, shortstory/longstory and categories - in-house and you can use it as an example of your coding ability.

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That sounds like a perfect Sunday afternoon project, which I'll try and get round to this weekend. Watch this space, and thanks ;)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Pawf

Hi gang,

Me again! I'm looking for positive and constructive feedback on my latest portfolio design. It's still to be fully populated with all the details for every job I've done, but there's enough on there to get a gist for what it's about.

www.osmith.co.uk

Thanks!

Oliver

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Hey, it looks good upto now. However, instead of having the images on ontop of the other. Maybe you could add them into a slideshow or something so it looks smarter.