The result of two weeks of work

Thanks again, I’m also almost completely self taught, and have read the recommended book.

I’ll try to fix the alignment of all the elements to follow a set grid in a later revision, It’s all so much easier on Photoshop than it is when writing the html.. It is really nice you people pay attention to details! It’s especially useful because often you become blind to your own mistakes.


Yours,
Ilkka Hartikainen

Quote from: smashingred at Mar 19, 2008, 10:46 AM

Ahh, but I am not a "trained" designer. I am entirely self taught--with the help of a library card and an Amazon account.

If you are a web designer who wants to learn about design without all the theory, I strongly recommend Robin Williams’ (not the actor) book The Non-Designer’s Design Book. It helps build a foundation for better design whether you are building a website or designing a business card.

here’s more props for Williams’ book. this text was required for one of my college classes, and it was VERY helpful.

i really like your site, ikkah. i do have a couple of suggestions.

1. find a way to stretch the orange background of your div.maincontent to the footer. it’s only being applied to the maincontent div’s background, and when the main content doesn’t stretch the length of the subnav menu, you have a floating sea of grey. perhaps you should slice it the whole way across in photoshop and save it as div.content’s background for a "faux" stretch. more info here: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/fauxcolumns/

2. i would change the hover color of the links in the main nav to match the orange background of your submenu div. i think this would provide consistency, plus the white is kind of distracting against the light grey background.

3. increase the line height of your content. that will help with the stretch thing too.

now for the compliments...

i really like the color scheme. very unique. i like you how you use text for most navigation and headings instead of images. the page validates; great job! you use tables where you need to correctly, and css everywhere else. your navigation is very intuitive and easy to use; i found it very simple to find my way around the site. i love seeing what MODx can do...i find it an absolutely fascinating CMS CMF.

ilkkah
Nice job. And don’t worry - it gets way easier and faster working with MODx!

Don Juan, great comments! The orange maincontent could stretch, you are right in that. I could make it stretch quite easily, I believe, by getting rid of it’s background alltogether and replacing the grey behind it with the orange. I’ll look into it after I get back from a week’s holiday . The link hovers need a bit of refinement, I agree. And I’ll increase the line-height, good point. Right now the font sizes are partly fixed, partly not, and that is no good. I’ll fix them.

Thanks!


-Ilkka Hartikainen

Very nice job!

It’s simple in it’s design, but it works very well to catch the eye of the viewer and get them intrigued by your content.