Another Site

I quite like the header if that's what your asking - but is this a website - no.

How can you ask for a critic on a design that is barely started? all you have here is a header and a navigation bar....

it's like saying what do you think of my new conservatory when only the brick work at the bottom is built and no frame or glass up!
 
You beat me to it tbwcf, there's not really much to look at Timmo?
I don't like the logo tbh, it looks a bit cartoon-y... but without any site content or other pages I have no idea what image you're trying to portray? I would also consider using the domain name with a hyphen when you have a two word domain with the last letter of the first word being the same as the first letter from the second word, eg. fod-design, think it makes it easier to read (obviously keep both :))
Greg
 
I just wanted to get some feedback on the rough look of it before I spend hours more on it.
 
To be honest Timmo, I don't really it. I think you have to decide what style you want to go for. The naive hand drawn looking identity you have in the header could work quite nicely if you keep the rest of the design in that style as well. Textures, organic elements and so on.

Something along these lines for example We Are not Freelancers
 
Design wise bit sparse, but my area is more coding which there is some, so yeah for me. :D

Change your html and meta content type from this ~
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />


to ~
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en" dir="ltr">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />


As that tells user agents how to parse the document more correctly, the language of the page, English, the namespace for the document which is required in XHTML documents, and the direction of the writing in this case left to right.

The meta content type is better in UTF-8, as iso-8859-1, or Latin-1, is a sub division of the UTF--8 format so UTF-8 is therefore better.

I would change the title element from ~

<title>FOD Design - Web and Graphic Designers - Forest of Dean - Homepage</title>

To ~

<title>FOD - Web and graphic designers based in the Forest of Dean</title>


As that gets rid of a pointless word, character and spaces, - homepage which waters down it's effectiveness, but this change also makes it more readable at the same time.

I like the use of the unordered list for your navigation, no flaming titles which is good. :)

Again I would change your h1 tag to read FOD - Web and graphic designers based in the Forest of Dean

As that would be better for the search engines.

However you use a lot of paragraphs for styling.
<p> </p>

All those can be removed and a CSS rule similar to this can be applied ~
p{margin:20px 0}

To achieve the same effect but with less code.

The images of your recent work should be in an unordered list as they are a list of images, ALT attributes are very good but the height and width can either be removed if that is their actual height and width or moved to CSS.

This section ~
<!-- Free Web Hosting with PHP, MySQL and cPanel, No Ads Analytics Code -->
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://analytics.hosting24.com/count.php"></script>
<noscript><a href="http://www.hosting24.com/"><img src="http://analytics.hosting24.com/count.php" alt="web hosting" /></a></noscript><!-- End Of Code -->


Shouldn't be outside the html tag, if it is to go at the bottom it needs to be before the closing body tag.

Create a plain file and call it .htaccess in their place this code and upload it to your root directory.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.foddesign\.co\.uk [nc]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.foddesign.co.uk/$1 [R=301,L]


As you currently have 2 versions of your site, 1 under www. and the other under the non www. version these will get you penalized in the search engines unless you redirect them, that code will do that.

I would also remove the word copyright and instead place the copyright symbol in it's place ~ &copy; will do that.

Hope it helps.

Jaz

Key:
Red ~ Mod_Rewrite
Purple ~ Extensible Hypertext Markup Language
Green ~ Cascading Style Sheet
 
Thanks for that, really useful.

The script code outside the body tag is automatically put there by the free hosting i'm using so can't change that. I have got a .htaccess file already as well just havn't uploaded it yet.
 
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