Click to See Complete Forum and Search --> : How do I get a more pro look ? yodbod.com
DaveinLondon
06-15-2005, 12:16 AM
Hello I have been learning to program in php and have a website
up - www.yodbod.com
I have been concentrating on having the functionality - which works - but
the site lacks a professional look and feel.
I wanted the design to be Simple, Attractive and Jolly.
Somewhere I have lost the professional look.
Any pointers as to what I can do to get my site looking more atractive would be welcome.
I am probably lacking vital s/w what do you recommend that I use to sort out my site ?
the tree
06-15-2005, 02:32 AM
You certainly don't need any fancy software to produce a proffesional looking site notepad would usualy suffice although if you want a helping hand then html kit (http://www.chami.com/html-kit/) is rather fun, and tottally free of course.
Acording to your (unesserary) javascript, those buttons turn lime, which is a shade of green, not yellow although the WAI (http://w3.org/WAI) guidelines advise against portraying infomation via colour alone anyway and I'm sure your visitors would understand how to use basic navigation anyway.
That shouldn't even be marked up as inputs anyway, those are for forms. For navigation lists, use lists! Check out listmatic (http://css.maxdesign.com.au/listamatic/) for some ways of doing that.
Avoid using tables for layout (http://hotdesign.com), they are wasting your bandwidth and damaging your search engine rating.
So as to make your site look a bit more proffesional, try using what my art teacher liked to call a limited pallett; only use a certain range of colours like black, white and a few shades of red (those are an example, not a suggestion although they wouldn't hurt) and stick to those. It'll make your site look calmer and less patched together. If all else fails, use a color scheme generator (http://wellstyled.com/tools/colorscheme2/index-en.html).
If I were you, I'd tighten up the page by giving it a consistent width, the way it jumps from around 70 to 100 percent doesn't look good. If you put the whole thing in a divider of around 50% (give or take 10) and center that (but don't center the text that looks tacky) then you'll find the page looks a lot more structured.
When you mention a section in your text, why not link to it? It'd make navigating your pages a tad easier and certainly make it look a lot less like just a lot of unhelpful copy.
Don't be afraid to lay out your homepage the same as your product listing. You could fill the sidebars with the infomation that you've currently got at the top of your homepage, thus eliminating half the scrolling that visitors have to do.
If I were you, I'd loose the running AIM guy, it's not really relevant to your site and it gets rather irritating after a while. Consider using better quality graphics software (http://gimp.org/) to get that proffesional look that your after, but like I said, an awsome site can be made in notepad, images aren't really that nessersary.
When you can validate your pages (http://validator.w3.org/check?verbose=1&uri=http://www.yodbod.com/) and try to code them sematicaly, that is, with meaning. When you have a list, don't use asterixes and line breaks. Use lists (<ul></ul>) and list items (<li></li>).
Carry on, this site could well become something great, but you'll need to work at it.
Best of luck.
JDM71488
06-15-2005, 04:11 PM
yes, i agree with everything said above, but to me, a more "pro look" consists of a few things:
1) a structured design, even if its one column...
2) nicely matched colors that compliment...
3) and cleaner graphics...
yours look pretty pixelated, which sometimes people can't help because of the software they use. Web sites don't have to have graphics, but if they do, it's nice for them to look nice...
i probably didn't help much, but i tried, good luck...
DaveinLondon
06-16-2005, 11:14 PM
Thanks for the input guys.
Going to apply the colour wheel principles
but it seems that I could still have lotts of colurs if I select
the four-way cross symbol ??
Is it best to use that single colour ( a bit boring )
or contrasting colours or the the "Y" three colors
or the "X" four colurs. Or doesn't matter so long as
they harmonise ??
I think my website needs dif. colors to make the dif headings
stand out ???
ww.yodbod.com
your thoughts apreciated. :)
Any more thoughts ?