The site is a Online North Carolina Golf Community for North Carolina Golfers. Enjoy NC Golf Courses Profiles, Free Golf Handicap Tracker, NC Tee Time Bookings, Share and Discuss with fellow Golfers in our golf in the Carolina’s section, Find nc golf packages and Pinehurst Area Golf Packages, Review-Rate nc golf courses, and much more. Here’s a spin off i’ve done also Golf Handicap Calculator

NCGolfers.com

Thanks,
Wayne

This is my first website I’ve ever built… please crituque and review.

Looks great, but it’s a little heavy on imagery. Still that’s outstanding that it’s your first website. Are you doing this for a living now? Because you should.

swaters21 - 26 January 2007 09:36 PM

Looks great, but it’s a little heavy on imagery. Still that’s outstanding that it’s your first website. Are you doing this for a living now? Because you should.

Thank you very much,

I would love to do Design, and website design for a living, I just don’t know how or where to start.
If you or anyone else could direct me in the right direction that would be great! :)

wayne

I’ve updated the site, and made it so the imagery isn’t so heavy now :)

wayne

Sorry for the late reply.

That’s better, but I would suggest a background color. Then again it still looks fine to me. What’s your deal, do you have a background in graphic design? You’re pretty good for a beginner. Tell you the truth I’m a little jealous of your skill. Mainly because I’m a biginner too and I can’t design a website near as good as that one.

If you want to do this for a living, then my belife is it’s all about contacts and learning the right stuff. I would suggest building websites for friends and family while learning languages like php , mysql and frameworks like ruby- which should be simple enough to do with a little time. Once you got a portfolio built demostrating your skill and knowledge in the aformentioned things, it should be easy for you to get a job by replying to the classifids on sites like craigslist.com and metafilter.com. Also you may want to check out http://www.guru.com and http://www.getafreelancer.com which are websites that cater to freelancers.

By the way, I’m looking to get in the webdesign and development biz too. My above advice might not be the best, but I feel strongly that’s what you have to do. I’ve been checking craigslist frequently and companies are always asking for a portfolio and someone who knows php and mysql languages. They don’t ask a for a degree, so I figure if you have the skill then you have a chance getting hired by them.

That sounds cool, I’ll have to check that out.  About me… the first time i ever opened up photoshop or anything else was about 4 months ago. So no I have no background in design or website building. But I’m going to try and get into a graphic design school in the next few months.

Background color? I’m going with the white because it sets the colors off in the picture’s and header. But what are your suggestions, I might try them out.

wayne

is anyone picking up any problems in certain browsers? anyone here using ie6?

wayne

Viewing your site in IE6 on WinXP, here is what I see:
1) Your overall site navigation(?) containing active links for Instruction, Handicap Tracker, etc. is only accessible if I scroll to the right (it is positioned to the right of your main content).
2) I assume that you still do not have all the content available since your links(?) in your Member Comments, Top 100 NC Golfers, Fresh Club Tools, etc. are not live… as are the listings for information about the various courses, weather forecast, etc. etc.

Taking a look at your source it appears your coding techniques show you are well-infected with “div-itis”.
*she grins* (you can read more about that here http://www.csscreator.com/divitis and here http://www.456bereastreet.com/lab/web_development_mistakes/)

Other than that it looks like you’re off to a great start!  I like your design choices, although you might try breaking up your text paragraphs a bit to improve readability.

Cheers!

Hmm.. ok that navigation is not supposed to be like that :) i’ll go through your links and see what i can come up with.

wayne

Your site looks gorgeous in Firefox ,header navigation not visible in IE 6 but ok in Opera 9.0 .Since more than 90% of people may still be using IE6 you have to make some adjustments for them .Overall a nice layout

sc18 - 13 February 2007 01:24 AM

Your site looks gorgeous in Firefox ,header navigation not visible in IE 6 but ok in Opera 9.0 .Since more than 90% of people may still be using IE6 you have to make some adjustments for them .Overall a nice layout

Ty, I think i’ve fixed the IE6 problem… grrh i hate IE

wayne

Ok, looks like all bugs are fixed,

Now Anyone PLEASE PLEASE, offer suggestions on how I can Improve anything from layout to design, content, navigation, etc.

wayne

Hi again Wayne,
I REALLY like the new header image! (the sun peeking over the hill and adding a nice glow to the rolling greens… very nice)

Viewing in IE6, it appears you are not consistent with the styling of headings within your pages (i.e. NC Golf Courses, Instruction, Handicap Tracker, etc.). On some you use the H1 tag, but on other you’re using a span that applies the larger red text.  Personally I prefer the larger red text… may I suggest you adopt more semantic coding and apply the styling you’ve created for your “style1” to the H1 tag and then use the H1 tag on all pages.

I don’t know if this is an IE6 thing or not, but in your primary nav bar in your header, your Home link stays white background regardless of the page the person is on… wouldn’t it be more usable to have the link for the page they are on show white? Unless you make your H1 text stand out more there’s very little visual cue of what page they are on.

Take a look at code in all your pages (except Home), they’re failing validation for the XHTML… you’re having id’s appear more than once on the page, that’s definitely a no-no.  If you need to have more than one “course” or “city” on a page, use classes.

Keep up the good work!

First off, i joined this forum just to answer this thread because I feel it necessary to help one another in this industry. The overall design is nice, the color scheme is good and the content fills things up nicely. Did you use a program or make this from scratch? 

Now the bad. Its fixed width, which IMO sucks. I hate fixed width, with the ability to buy monitors at best buy with a hugh screen resolutions for peanuts it really is necessary to have a liquid/fluid layout. Secondly try adjusting the font size on your page, all of the text squishes together and overlaps each other. No good. Not very accessible.

Your entire site can be redesigned using my favorite type of layout which is a liquid/fluid/elastic design. You can maintain a min and max width (with certain hacks for CBC (cross browser comparability) in order to achieve your desired design appearance and you can just make the site in general a percentage rather then a fixed pixel width. You can make the columns in EMs as well so that if users wish to resize the font the columns will expand with the resized text rather then overlap and make your site look cheap and unprofessional.

I am viewing your site with my cheapo gateway monitor with a max resolution of 1024x768 and with one text resize up in firefox 2.0 your navigation at the top breaks already.  With 2 levels of text resizing (up) your text begins to overlap and with 3 and 4, well you get the picture. 3x text resize isn’t all that uncommon, the text isn’t that much larger but it overlaps everything and just makes a mishmash of the otherwise well designed (looking) site.

Your entire site can easily be converted to a liquid/elastic layout that can expand to various resolutions and accomodate users who wish to resize their text. Google elastic and liquid layouts, you’ll find a new way to design and i’m sure you won’t look back.

Good luck and keep on truckin.

http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/200504/fixed_or_fluid_width_elastic/

I see what your saying but that’s only in firefox, IE 7 doesn’t have that (problem) which i think is more of a browser problem, than a website problem.

waynem80 - 11 March 2007 02:57 PM

I see what your saying but that’s only in firefox, IE 7 doesn’t have that (problem) which i think is more of a browser problem, than a website problem.

which part exactly are agreeing with me on, i mentioned several things. And if your referring to the layout resizing, its not a browser issue you have pixels set, its that simple. If you are referring to the font resizing messing up your page your more than likely going to be leaving out a great majority of people who don’t have 20/20 and want to increase their text size. IE resizes to a certain point, especially if you have predefined the font size in pixels, change the pixel font size to keyword of percentage and your layout in ie7 will bust too. So again, I say, its not a browser problem, its your layout.

Read statistics:

2007             IE7     IE6     IE5     Fx     Moz     S     O
February   16.4%    39.8%    2.5%    31.2%    1.4%    1.7%    1.5%
January   13.3%    42.3%    3.0%    31.0%    1.5%    1.7%    1.5%

31.2% of people using FF compared to 39.8% of IE - more and more are switching my friend, keep that in mind