I'm kind of new to webdesign for clients. I know I haven't read everything there is to know about creating a great web site. Please, comment on this site;
http://www.micromango.com/afrolatinfest
Thanks
V.
It looks great - good job. However, I'd recommend the following (probably a matter of taste):
1. The font colour (yellow/orange) may look nice on the red background, but it isn't very readable... I would recommend either brightening it up, or using white (or off-white) as the colour of your text. For links, I guess it looks fine. Also, this way you can keep your links' colour and "plain text" colour very different so it is easy to spot links.
2. You have a broken image at the bottom right of the page (in the footer), and the links are all blue, which does not match the rest of the colour scheme.
3. Justifying your text will make it look more neat.
4. Some pages' titles are the same (and most are too short, e.g. "sitemap") - couple this with the fact that the actual link (at the top of the page - the navigation) for the page you are on (e.g. "calendar") isn't differentiated (try to colour it differently), and it is "hard" to know at a glance what page you are looking at. Also, changing the title to match the content on the page (and making it descriptive) will boost your search engine rankings.
This refers to a file that is only present on your hard drive!
6. If you can, you should look into making your site validate to web standards... It's nice to be able to claim a "standards compliant web site" :)
7. The wide black footer at the bottom kind of "spoils" the flow of each page, because it is wider than the content above it. If you change it to a lighter colour (or make it transparent) and make it as wide as the body text container, it will look better.
Apart from the above, I like it... Your use of photography is really good!
Thanks so much for your reply.
Yes, It is true that my colors might not make sense. Perhaps, I should read about color schemes. Do you know a webiste or book ? Also, the standards are in w3.org ?
Thanks for the feedback. I'm a mechanical engineer who got dragged into web pages design by accident so I don't have much design background.
V.
You're welcome :)
Your colours are fine - it's just that the colour of the main text might hurt eyes in bright environments (and be difficult to read). There should be a high contrast between background colour and text colour (not that I always follow that "golden rule" ;)).
Yes, I did mean w3.org web standards, but it isn't compulsory. If it will involve learning a lot of new stuff, then your site is fine as is for now. But if you do have time, you should look into learning XHTML and get into the habit of validating your web pages. Personally, I think the best/only way to achieve that is to hand-code, but, again, a learning curve is involved.
As for sites that can help you, check out the following:
- Some of your images do not have the height and width attributes specified, doing this prevents the page jumping around while loading.
- Also I noticed that the background colour of your top image (i.e. the title bit) doesn't quite match the background colour of the rest of your page, to get around this you should use "transparent GIFs or PNGs" this is important since different browsers and hardware can render colours slightly differently, so even if the colours match on your PC they might not match on another users PC.