OK fella, I know this is all new to you, and so far so good considering, fine work for a young un! But that doesn’t mean it couldn’t be improve a lot with some relatively minor changes.
I hope you appreciate some constructive criticism, because here it comes:
- Your header is too big. Making use of the space is all important with sites - the less scrolling the better. You could fit what you have into half the height.
- Your navigation is also far too big. It’s because of the photo galleries listed in it once you enter that section I’m guessing. I’ll get to that in a bit! Right now bear in mind that you could cut it to about 80 pixels wide and it will still work. Once again it\'s about freeing up more room for the all important content.
- \'Empty\' as a link is not good. Remove it, or if you can\'t, just make it into \'Coming soon\' and on the page put a brief list of other cool things you will eventually add to your site. Don\'t however put in the names of other upcoming sections and have the page display an \'Under Construction\' message. Lots of folk do this but it is really bad web practice.
- Why the clock? Just because something can be done doesn\'t mean it should! It serves no useful purpose (We all have clocks on our machines anyway) so scrap it.
- Get a picture of a miniature on there quick! That’s what the site’s going to be about, so let people see that as soon as they hit your homepage. Perhaps put one in place of the clock?
- Change \'the home page\' title to something along the lines of \'Welcome to my site\'.
- Move the jukebox bellow the main content on the page. It isn\'t what your site is about really so it shouldn\'t be the first thing seen.
- Your font choice isn\'t too great. This is not just a case of personal taste either. It doesn\'t resize well (Hold ctrl and scroll your mousewheel up and down to see what I mean). A sans serif (without curls) font will do better. You can\'t go wrong with Verdana.
- Images should really have alt tags. It\'s good practice.
- Cross headers to break up text are always a good plan, it makes things more scanable. Not such a biggie now, but one to think about for the future for sure.
- I think you would be better off left or right aligning your pictures to embed them into the text. You can then change the stylesheet to put some spacing around them so that the text doesn\'t sit tight against them.
- The photo galleries in the left nav are forcing it to be very wide. Once you have lots of galleries it will also make the links below them fall way down the page. Why not put the links to the different galleries on the page itself rather than in the nav? Each one could be represented as a thumbnail with a description beneath it.
- Consistency – Your headers are in red, then on the photo galleries full descriptions suddenly become red. This is a little odd. Follow the format you have done before, with the gallery title in red and the description in black below.
- The ‘Close this window’ bit at the bottom of the gallery doesn’t work. Get rid of it.
- Add ‘target=”_blank”\' to the links in the galleries to make them appear in a new window perhaps?
And as far as I can see from the tracks in your jukebox you have good taste. Well, similar to mine anyway! If you haven’t already you should check out (with suggested album in brackets) and then put up tunes from – Leftfield (Leftism), Aim (Cold Water Music), Attica Blues (Attica Blues), DJ Shadow (Entroducing), Unkle (Psyence Fiction), Lemon Jelly (Lost Horizons), Chemical Brothers (Exit Planet Dust), Plaid (Rest Proof Clockwork), Moloko (Do You Like My Tight Sweater), Roni Size (New Forms), Grooverider (Mysteries of Funk), Tricky (Maxinquay), Portishead (Dummy), Canibal Ox (The Cold Vein), Jurassic 5 (Jurassic 5). And I’ll stop there!
