My sites up

[freelancer]

Finally, about 12 months on after started the redesign, I have the site and blog up with some tweaks to be made but still up there.

Perhaps you can take a look at the site? Let me know if there are any bugs or things you'd like to be fixed.

URL: www.bengribbin.com

[Cracking Media]

A good looking site Ben - well done.

All the best to you,
Peter

[yandos]

I like it Ben, the only thing I would say is that the top links could do with standing out a bit more as I never realised it was nav until i scrolled the page up and down a few times looking for the next page. Also perhaps make the frontpage email a link?

[LOS Design UK]

Bravo Ben

nice looking site. Just one minor moan, looks a bit skinny on my widescreen monitor sat in the middle of nothingness.

maybe could benefit from a bit of s-t-r-e-t-c-h-i-n-g...

just a thought.

[Cracking Media]

Just one minor moan, looks a bit skinny on my widescreen monitor sat in the middle of nothingness.

maybe could benefit from a bit of s-t-r-e-t-c-h-i-n-g...

Yes, I think I would agree. I have a 1680 pixels wide display and it is rather narrow on that.

Even setting the browser width for what would be an 800 pixel wide display (which represents less than 1% of Internet users) shows quite a lot of space both sides.

I would suggest designing the page for a 1024 pixel wide display, so make the div defined by 'wrapper' in your CSS to 920px instead of the 560px it is now. For that you will need to adjust the width of your other page elements as well such as the 'blog' div on the right. Those are simple changes taking a few minutes, but you will also need to make the footer.jpg wider to fill the new width of the page.

Anyway, just suggestions, and as said before the site looks good.

Peter

[freelancer]

thanks for feedback everyone, could someone test the contact form and quote form? I keep getting blanks ones through...

I would normally add validation, so I guess I'll go down that route

[Cracking Media]

You should have email!

[freelancer]

You should have email!

Thanks a Bunch mate

[awebapart]

Different web designers have different views about whether web designs should be fluid/stretchy or fixed, or what is the ideal minimum width in a fluid design, or what is the ideal fixed width. Personally, I don't see much of a problem if a designer wants to be different and go for shorter than 800 width design. Our own designs are usually 800 fixed width and we have a web design width article on our site which gives reasons why we adopt this approach.

The one thing I will pick up on about your site, which isn't a subjective matter of personal taste thing, but a known problem for SEO, is your multiple home page issue. You have 2 home pages, domain.com (the home page people get to when they type your site in the browser or click on an external link) and domain.com/index.php (the home page people get to when they click on the home button in your website when they are not on the home page but want to return to the home page). This issue affects SEO by causing internal pagerank importance issues (making the home page less important when it should be the most important page) and duplicate content issues. This issue is also present on some of your client's sites too. Ideally you should change your internal home links so they point to domain.com rather than domain.com/index.php. This issue is the most common and IMO the biggest problem in the overall SEO issue of URL canonicalization

[freelancer]

I'd like firstly to thank everyone here for replying and being very nice and polite. It shows that A1BF has a great community.

I posted the same question on UKBF heres some replies:

Don't see much evidence of your graphic design skills on the site and the fact that the layout changes away from the home page isn't too impressive.

I just dont get it.

I have no idea what you do and couldn't find the navigation so got bored and left.

Sorry

I dont get the design? You are meant to be a designer but the site looks very simple and templated. you need to show off a little bit.

I'm with fisicx. Sorry, as someone with a web design background, it shows a complete lack of creativity and just does nothing for me. Sorry to be harsh

This is going to sound a bit harsh so I apologise, but how come it took so long to build?

Now, I want everyone to be deadly honest. If you agree with these people (who were all mostly web designers, and I dont think their sites are up to scratch tbh, but thats beside the point...), Should I start again, and create a very unique and different design?

I am concerned if they think that, my clients will think that. Thanks for all your friendly replies here, but please, do be ruthless. Imagine if I fixed the homepage up and all the other issues. Would it be good enough? Should I start again?