Im new here, how you all doing?

[andycreativemind]

Hi everyone, just thought I would introduce myself. I am Andy and work as a self employed graphic designer and thought this would be a great place to talk to other designers and share ideas as well as learn a few new things.

Ive just set up my own company called Creative Mind Design and would be very interested to hear what you guys think of my website. Its the first one I have built in iweb and as I am new to web just thought I would post it on here and see what ways I could improve it.

You can find the site on this link

www.creativeminddesign.co.uk

I would love to here your opinions on it and look forward to talking to you all.

[Corrosive]

Welcome to the forum.

The website looks OK (maybe a little on the small side). The coding is terrible, but that's WYSIWYG for you and not your fault.

If you are going to get any enquiries off it you need to be found in Google and that requires some knowledge of semantic markup.

[ARRIVALS]

Hey, welcome to the forum.

If I'm honest, I'm not keen on it.

Firstly, like the poster above said, it looks really small. On the landing page I really dislike the luminous green hit counter. No need for that at all. Your actual logo isn't bad. It just looks awful on the metal effect background. It'd look much cleaner and much nicer in 1 or 2 colours on a plain white background. The 'enter' button isn't all that clear either.

When you're in the site, the small issue is evident again - accept, now it's even smaller. You're cramming everything into the middle section - which actually looks quite nice.

You have the natural / nature theme with the leaves in your logo, the leaves and branches and various animals through your site, yet it's all still sat on a metal effect background. It doesn't work. Just make it a plain white background and make the whole thing bigger and that'll improve it 100%.

[Boss Hog]

A warm welcome to the GDF.

Cheers

Damon

[pcbranding]

I agree that removing the steel sides/backgrounds and letting the natural theme sit on a white ground and giving your work a bit more breathing space would be a vast improvement.

[Katedesign]

Hi - welcome to the forum!

As above give it more space and lose the counter and lose the 'enter here' page! The steel sides take a while to load - which I don't personally like. And learn to spell 'stationery'...!

[andycreativemind]

Thanks to everyone for your comments so far its been a real help, I will take onboard what you have all said and make some changes. I agree the site does look small in comparison to other websites I have looked at so I will sort that out. I have managed to move one of the pages around and ditched the metal effect. With more space to breath and a larger page on the screen it does look a lot nicer I think.

I notice people dont really have an enter page now, is this an old fashioned thing to do.

I will also get rid of the Hit Counter, seemed a good idea at the time.

Also cant believe I spelt stationery wrong and did not spot it, thanks Kate.

Thanks again guys.

[Corrosive]

I notice people dont really have an enter page now, is this an old fashioned thing to do.

It's not only old-fashioned bad idea. Your home page is the one that Google (other search engines are available) gives the most weight to in terms of rankings. Because yours (and most splash pages) are just images, which search engine bots/spiders can't read, your home page is, fundamentally blank. Not good for getting found on Google. You need some HTML text explaining exactly what it is you do on your home page.

You might enjoy this; Corrosive Online: Articles - Top Ten Web Design Beginner Mistakes

[garywaiman]

Welcome to GDF!

I'm not a web designer by any stretch of the imagination but the page titles seem to be quite short? As mentioned already, the introduction page should be your homepage and in the title attribute, you could maybe change it to "Creative Mind Design | Introduction"? Looks a bit more organised, I think, and a similar thing on other pages too? :)

[byronc]

Hi,

welcome.

take out the "this website is being built bit".

you dont need to let anyone know the state of your site...