I'm here Tim don't worry I'm taking a break from my meat quest, lol, what you like dude.
I must say though dude your knowledge is really starting to come on, well impressed fella.
I normally only do the Home page, but yeah Tim's absolutely spot on about the contact page.
Change the image to get rid of the details, put them in a paragraph tag, position the paragraph with CSS so something like
#contactdetails{position:absolute;top:250px;margin-left:600px;line-height:2.4em}
Change the title to ~
Contact Tom Stutt web and graphic designer based in Devon, as that reads better.
As Tim's right it's currently an accessibility nightmare, and hiding email address in this day an age is TBH pointless. I set up a new Gmail address never used for the first 10 days checked back and it had all ready got spam, not hard to create a script that goes though name variations and numbers and email you that way TBH. The only way to fight spam these days is down to your email providers spam filter, IMO.
Then place the noindex meta in the head of the page ~
<meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow" />
That will stop the search engines from indexing the page and spread the equity around the rest of your site much more efficiently.
<meta http-equiv="www.tomstuttdesign.co.uk" content="freelance,web,design,graphic,design,bristol,designer,www.tomstuttdesign.co.uk,tomstuttdesign" />
Not entirely sure what browser and exactly what you are trying to control with that but it's pointless.
The meta http-equiv tag is to control browsers and set the info they get from the page.
For example ~
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
Tells browsers that the page is a text/html document and that special characters should be encoded in the UTF-8 format.
I would put that in the keyword meta as that is where that info should go, so ~
<meat name="keywords" content="www.tomstuttdesign.co.uk ~ freelance,web,design,graphic,design,bristol,designer,www.tomstuttdesign.co.uk,tomstuttdesign" />
However as you are repeating your site name several times this may actually get you penalized.
Now the tag anyway is actually useless, Yahoo! is the only 1 who is reported to still support it and as Bing will shortly be supplying their search results it will shortly be entirely pointless, I would just delete the whole thing TBH.
Your home page's title element should be changed from ~
<title>tomstuttdesign.co.uk</title>
To ~
<title>Tom Stutt web and graphic design free lancer based in Devon</title>
As that provides the search engines with more information to rank your site, and to clients a better idea of what your site is about straight off the SERPs.
<script type="text/javascript">
</script>
I really don't see the point in that, so you should remove it TBH.
On your home page your H1 heading should be around your logo ~
<h1><img src="http://www.designforums.co.uk/images/tom-stutt-design-logo-web.png" alt="Tom Stutt Design"></h1>
Also apply the no border to the image via CSS and not actually within the code.
The H1 tag is one of the most important XHTML tags when it comes to the search engines as it is used and does help to rank the page, as a result you only need 1 of them, more may get you into crap.
Also think about headings in an off-line environment. In an essay for example you have the main large heading which is the title, each heading below that then gets smaller. to do this in a on-line environment you use the other Hx tags.
So switch the
latest news and
Most recent design project headings to H2 tags not H1 tags.
This is also not a heading ~
<h5>Copyright © 2009 Tom Stutt Design.</h5>
And should be switched to a paragraph tag.
Now remove the welcome.... as that just adds to the clutter and TBH most ppl wont care if you welcome them. The average time a user spends on any given web page is only 10seconds, that's including page load time, so you need those 10 seconds to qualify to them why they are there, welcome doesn't do this.
Your links are also not obvious, underline them as that's what users expect, or at least have them as a different colour.
I would reword your welcome message as well ~
<b>My name is Tom Stutt and this is my on-line portfolio of my web and graphic design work.</b> I live in Bristol and currently work as an IT Support Technician but in my free time I am a freelance graphic and web designer. I love design and it has always been a passion of mine, and I am always looking to progress with my design skills, while keeping up to date (if you do) with the latest advancements in the web and graphic design industries, and would welcome any exciting new projects.
<b>I currently design in and use Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign and Notepad ++ for all of my design work.</b> I am self-taught and I am always interested in learning new skills - I am currently teaching myself Flash.
Please feel free to browse my web and graphic design portfolio. If you would like me to quote for any design services that I offer please do not hesitate to contact me.
As that reads better, but more importantly you are adding words for the search engines in the correct places and in the correct tags, in this case the bold tag, which they take note of IMO.
Also the links again clarify to site users more about the following page and add more call to actions where they should be. But also it helps the search engines rank those pages better as well.
Apart from that coding wise yeah pretty good, I would up it to the strict doctype TBH as you are more than capable, and remove the hr tags as they are bad tags and apply a top and bottom border to the welcome message instead.
Hope it helps.
Jaz
Key:
Green ~ CSS
Purple ~ XHTML