Exercise in web design

[Learnear]

Hi folks. Just mentioning a new site that I am working on as part of an assessment for a web design course. The URL is

the title of the home page is Helen's Garden Design - Home. Now this is not yet a real site and so the information is neither complete nor the photos real. However, there is a Helen and she does have the background, achievements and interests described and does run garden design business - and will be on the web when I can get her to turn some attention away from actual soil and plants - and family, and to the subject of producing a web page. Getting the teenagers to finally leave home will help of course. If you want to contact her you can email me at [e-mail] in the meantime.

[Tom J]

In the meantime, you need to put New Zeland on the opening page and other places where it has addresses, because the site will be seen around the world. Next kill the running strip - big distractor.

Tom J

[JoeSpareBedroom]

I agree with Tom. Lose the red banner right away. It's a pointless gimmick. And make sure no sounds or music ever play without the express permission of the visitor. Nothing automatic.

[Stephen Henning]

I agree with the others. Also, with Firefox, the Garden Plans page looks OK but the other two have a horizontal line going through the first line of text under the 3 links.

You should test your site on:

Firefox Safari Opera Netscape

as well as Explorer.

These are free and I believe they are all multi platform except Explorer. Explorer abandoned other platforms other than Windows about 5 years ago.

[Bill R]

I agree with Tom and Joe. And garden sites should NEVER have sounds or music (I find it VERY annoying on ANY site). To me the best sites are the "simple" ones. Lots of pictures and no gimmicks.

[John McGaw]

and the title of the home page is Helen's Garden Design - Home. Now

Besides what others have noted, if you are just beginning to do page design it would be an excellent time to:

1. start using CSS to separate the style elements from the content in every page you do -- it makes later maintenance much less painful and after a day or so of learning it makes even the original composition easier.
2. test every page for compliance to all pertinent standards -- makes pages less dependent upon the browser used to view them.
3. always pay attention to appearances when switching pages however you style them. Having "fixed" elements jumping about even a little is jarring and detracts from the content.

But keep at it. Nothing succeeds like steady effort.

[David E. Ross]

and the title of the home page is Helen's Garden Design - Home. Now

The W3C validator at reports 34 HTML errors. The page appears designed for Internet Explorer, but 35%-40% of those viewing the Web use a non-Micro$oft browser. Thus, you should fix the errors to ensure that other browsers will indeed display what you want people to see.