[Help] Web design gurus

This is my very first website ever : http://amit.needlemen.com/ Thanks to Magnolium for the free webhosting !

Besides being a personal website to showcase my work, I plan to add articles later which illustrate the basics of modding and skinning for n e w b ies. Once I have finalised the design, I probably will be hosting some goodies - eg. avatar / sig templates on this site. I have some plans to make it an alternative download location for sought-after apps which are not easy to find online eg. Looca with the permission of the individual authors. All in good time perhaps.

I would appreciate feedback and suggestions for improvement on my layout. Please keep in mind that I am a complete novice at web design. I only learnt CSS last week and this is the result.

I made my own WP theme and customised the PHP files to suit me. I am a complete novice to PHP, though Any and all practical suggestions to improve this design are most welcome.

PS. I know it looks too much blog-ish right now and the shadows are a bit cut off

#281273

the enter button needs work...has 1px white fringe...plus doesnt really go with the design apart from it being blue

#281274

Thanks, m8 ! Fixed now

#281275

this is the original wp theme.

http://www.jowra.de/wp/2005/04/wordpress-theme-relaxation/

if you r interested

even if you have moded this theme

i thinkt u should named the author in your footer.

#281324

Remove the splash screen. It's unnecessary in this case, as in most cases.

-NC

#281339

i second what night crawler said, it'snot offering any use to the user, merely slows things down, so i'd try to incorporate the logo into your other pages instead. Other than that, it's not bad, i guess there's not too much flexibility in terms of structure with wordpress.

#281345

I like the logo on the "splash screen" use it on your site

#281353

Thanks, you guys !

I wanted to have a flash intro on the main page, but eschewed the idea since the whole idea was to have a fast site with more text and less images. The logo was actually the first few frames of a flash intro which was tossed out almost at the last minute.

Will consider scrapping the splash page

#281422

i would suggest you change the banner that says amits design world try to make a banner that keeps the style of the website consistent

#283261

Thanks for the suggestion !

I experimented with an aqua header initially, but it ended up looking like Kubrick - which was a strict no-no. That idea was very quickly trashed !!

I then put in a flash header temporarily with dissolving snapshots of my vectors, but I thought this was both too distracting and didn't quite fit in with the overall idea of making it more text and CSS based with as little images as possible. A flash header would also make it slow-loading, which is what I wanted to avoid.

Personally, I like this header - it shows off one of my favourite vector creations and gives a breath of freshness to the whole page. It also emphasizes that I consider myself first and foremost, a digital artist. Also, the background of the header matches with the background on the page, which was an unexpected bonus

#283277