lannadancer.com

lanna · June 13th, 2006, 05:02 AM

Hi, I'm new to web designing. I made a website for my wife. She is a professional Thai dancer. I didn't use any fancy software, just coding by hand. Well, what do you think? Could it be improved in any way? Thanks.

www.lannadancer.com

spinal007 · June 13th, 2006, 06:22 AM

The code is nice, specially for a newcomer. Great job.

The text is huge! I that how you really want it? You don't have much on the frontpage but still I have to scroll to even start reading the description. Maybe consider repositioning the image and/or the text.

Your menu is taking up too much space, the rest of the pages are being squashed to the right. Maybe change to a horizontal menu at the top of the page to give you more room for pictures, etc...

Personal opinion:
- the background colour doesn't convey the "dancing" topic of the website. it's a dull purple. It may look better on a white background with purple details.

minute44 · June 13th, 2006, 06:40 AM

Yay!!! my 200th post! lol

Anyways...

I may have to be cruel to be kind here...

There's one word for this site and that word is: Boring.

Your code is certainly very simple and your document structure is OK but only a small percentage of visitors are going to care... and unfortnately it's not the same small percentage that are into Thai dancing.

Here's what you need to do:

Write a style sheet that gives the site a little more! Somethig that makes it pop! Keep this style sheet external so you can edit your site easier.
Make your navigation out of an unordered list <ul> rather than a series of <h3> tags. It is more likely to validate this way and you can get some really stunning effects.
http://css.maxdesign.com.au/listamatic/index.htm
Use a container or Wrapper div to hold all your page elements. It is easier this way to center our site and give cool background styles.
Try and get some higher quality images...

Thats about all... implement these and you've cracked it really. You have a good code base to work with.

masonbarge · June 13th, 2006, 07:28 AM

Personally I like the violet okay, but my thoughts are running to red, gold, and "royal" shades of green and purple.

The homepage photo is too blurry, which is my only real criticism. Also, I don't think "welcome to my webpage" is a useful phrase.

If you can afford some software, I would buy a copy of Paintshop Pro, which you can get cheap on EBay. It takes time to learn how to use it. But your wife's site could really benefit from some ornamentation. The site itself would look really nice if there were some more "Thai" ornamentation. I have attacheda photo of something beautiful from Thai culture.

Check out this URL as a source of public domain graphics about Thailand:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Thailand

Finally, your text spills over into your pictures in Firefox.

Quote:

http://css.maxdesign.com.au/listamatic/index.htm

Gah, I h8u. I just spent about three hours making 3d horizontal buttons from scratch.

Oh well, it was a learning experience. And my buttons are better!

sypher · June 13th, 2006, 07:15 PM

From the look of the first image, a great idea would be to go for a mystique design.

Sorry if you dont get what i mean :P just me babbling.

moojoo · June 14th, 2006, 02:24 PM

I used to have a wife. She wasn't coded very well though.

The site seems to spread out and empty to me. Its not terrible just could use some TLC. Unfortunately I have no good input at this point except maybe playing with font sizes and trying a smaller container area.

LearningToProgram · June 15th, 2006, 01:21 AM

Ok, I am going to tell you this one thing, Great job on the coding. Very good for a newcomer. It looks very clean and is very easy to read. People don't realize how important this is.

Nextly, do you have an image editing program? I think your site would be so much better if it had a solid User Interface. Graphics don't have to be used necessarily, but it could add a lot to this site.

Your text is much too large, I would reconsider this text size and maybe leave it at (CSS) 10-14px . Also, your image gallery is one of the things that I would like to see improved. Once you click on one image you are forced to hit Next or Previous. One way you can fix this is by making small thumbnails people can click on, or just putting the image number below so people can scroll to the image they want to see. This is part of the "User Interface" I mentioned before.

Keep on going with it, I think you will have a very nice site if you keep up with it. But no matter what else you do, don't stop hand-coding, it is the best way.