Two Five Steel/Tech Website

[twofivedesigns]

I can never settle on a design, I always think of something new. Well here it is, I wanted to add new sections to the website so that was another reason to redo it.

[Chris]

Okay, I took a peek, and the one major thing I saw that needs some attention is your source. There are 111 errors on just the one page, but it looks like you're going with a primarily one page website. From a zealot's standpoint, that could be a breaking point for your work.

Not taking into consideration that portion, you really should try to get away from slicing in photoshop. Photoshop still slices its images using tables, and you're coding in xhtml transitional. The point of using xhtml is to adhere to stricter rulesets, and you're using css to style things as it is. It doesn't make much sense to use css and tables in the same work because the two are generations apart. Other than that, I can tell where your over the top style comes into play. There's alot of space in this design, alot of trendy flashy stuff. For the most part, you do a good job with your consistency.

The only issue I can see with the whole over-the-top style is optimization. Your entire site took about 30 seconds to load fully on my broadband, so you need to try to tighten things up in that aspect. The longer it takes your site to load, the less likely prospective clients will stick around to take a look at the rest.

Usability-wise, I noticed your portfolio loads in a new page. Is there a reason for this? You seem to bring every other element on your front page, why not think of a way to introduce your portfolio content into your layout? The other side to this is giving your gallery some love. I see alot of work, and that means you have alot of meat to throw around. But you need to give it some specificity and talk about the work presented. Tell the user what you did, how you did it, what it was for, etc etc. Details that will help others better understand your work will make it better for people to consider you for that big job.

Keep up the good work, and try some diversity. I notice alot of your work revolves around a similar style / color palette.

[twofivedesigns]

Yeah I know but most of my earlier designs were very graphically basic and mainly revolved around my portfolio so this time I went with a more "in-your-face" approach. I wanted to display my abilities first hand and I thought my site is the best place to do it. Yeah it takes a bit to load but knowing me I'll probably switch the design up in another 2 months anyway. My creativity is my biggest downfall, haha.

As far as the CSS goes, I know I used tables but I couldn't think of any other way to incorporate that layout without slices other than a 5 row div table with 5 large background images. Do you think that approach would be a better? Or would that load even slower.

[Chris]

I would imagine 5-6 divs could do just as good a job as tables. You can develop divs exactly as you would table cells without all the clutter. Tables are just so messy and unsemantic. I would definitely experiment and see where you go with divs. It certainly wouldn't hurt anything. You're better off leaving tables for tabular data, though.