Quick Question about my portfolio website

[aniketrk]

I hav a quick question. Hope u guys can help. I am an aspiring web designer/front end developer & hav started working in this industry with a good educational background. I have designed my personal/portfolio website nd wanted to receive a feedback on it, Its positives/negatives. I wanted to know if this kind of a portfolio website is good enough to land in a nice job (medium/large size companies).

URL : <snip>

I would really appreciate any feedback.

[edited by: alt131 at 3:04 am (utc) on Dec 18, 2011]
[edit reason] Thread Tidy - 404 [/edit]

[milosevic]

I really hope this isn't thinly veiled self promotion - think this thread will be deleted/censored very quickly anyway.

Your site and portfolio actually looks good to me though and I was expecting to rip on it to tell you the truth. It looks like you are a very talented graphic designer.

I probably wouldn't hire you to code HTML or CSS but that's because I have much higher standards than anyone running a business would. You have 6 validation errors in your code and your HTML contains presentational elements (eg images that should imo be CSS backgrounds). It's also rare for someone to be good at both this sort of graphical design and the back end coding stuff.

I would think about marketing yourself strongly from a designer perspective as this is clearly what you are very talented at (even if you can do the other things too).

I also wouldn't advertise that you use Adobe Dreamweaver...

Hope this helps

[SuzyUK]

I like it, it's very "in" with the big logo heading and the scrolling to sections, rather than clicking to pages, the hand drawings are also very in fashion too, very clean, easy and simple

in line with that I would remove the validation "badges" they're a bit "old fashioned" even if the code did validate, though I like the fact the blue/orange theme is carried on to the footer so maybe draw yourself some littler less obtrusive footer graphics?

Maybe change to an HTML rather XHTML Doctype in line with moving to HTML5, while XHTML does show you've got good coding practices it's not really that useful anymore except to say that you know how to close tags explicitly.. perhaps even code to the new HTML5 Doctype I think it allows either type of closing tag (someone will correct me if this is wrong I'm sure!) - so if it's just a case of changing the Doctype that should make your code seem as current as your design, in fact validating your page with the HTML5(experimental) validator only throws up 3 errors which are all the same - unencoded "&" - (they should be coded as &amp;) anyway with or without badges you should make the page validate :)

Good Luck with the the job hunting!

[aniketrk]

@ milosevic and @SuzyUK :
Thank you very much for your replies. I would like to say that this is in no way self promotion. I dont intent to do that right now. But I really wanted a feedback, as I alone cannot pin point my mistakes. All your comments are highly appreciated. I will take all these into consideration. I wanted to ask
@milosevic
-Thank you for your nice comments. It really helps and boosts.
- Where exactly did you find errors? I would like to correct them.
- I will correct the presentational elements as you suggested.
- Finally, what do you mean by higher coding standrads, Can you pinpoint a few in mine?
- I really want to be gr8 at this and would love your reply again.

@SuzyUK
- Thank you for your comments.
- I did not use HTML5 as it was still under construction and not supported by all browsers. I will surely did a little deeper into it.
- Can you give me any links for HTML5 experimental help and validation?

Finally @ everyone
- Is one page layout bad for this kind of a website. I know it will be a bad layout for a corporate/e-commerce website.

THANK YOU VERY VERY MUCH.
THIS HELPS .

This is not at all a self promotion.

[milosevic]

Hi aniketrk, glad that it's not self promotion, it does seem like you are genuinely looking for feedback.

I just had a look and can't see validation errors anymore so good job on that.

Your code is not bad at all in honesty, it feels like nit picking to point things out.

Line 229 <span class="author">-Bhagvat Gita</span></p><br />

The <br /> is presentational - also the "-" is not part of the author's name, so this structure is not semantically correct, that should be outside of the span.

Line 225 - <p style="float:right"> - inline style rather than a class

I'd suggest for somewhere to look at to improve your codes efficiency, looking into how using multiple classes on elements could simplify your CSS

With regards to a one page layout, I don't think there's anything necessarily wrong with this - I actually liked that aspect of the site, particularly the part at the bottom with examples of your design work and photos.

The drawback with one page sites though is that they're less likely to perform well in terms of search visibility. Not absolutely, with backlinks and good SEO they can still rank, but as Google etc like to some extent pigeonhole pages as suiting a particular topic, it could be a challenge to establish a strong relevancy for commercial keyphrases related to your business. However this is only really an issue if you intend to market through organic search.

[aniketrk]

@milosevic : Thank you so much for your feedback, AGAIN :). I never knew just putting 1 or 2 inline styles can also be eye catching for errors. Thanks for pointing that out and I will correct all those issues. In regards to search engine optimization, Yes, I will come up with better designs (kinda pigeonhole) for new projects. I cannot tell you how much these small things help.
I want to be a very good designer and a good coder and I am assuming these small things matter a lot.

This is the only place where I actually got a feedback. So THANK YOU AGAIN.

One more thing : when I come up with another design, can I post it here for feedbacks? or where do I post it? so It doesnt seem like I am promoting myself. Let me know if possible.
Regards,
aniketrk.

[milosevic]

Hi Aniketrk, these technical points probably don't matter from the point of view of people that would hire you to design sites.

In my experience most of the people wouldn't know what a validation error is, or how to look at source code - all they like is attractive graphics and a clean design, and you've got a strong hold on that I'd say! I've seen business owners choose a crowdsourced design just because they liked the stock photos used in it (even though they were unlicensed and weren't be used in the final build!).

Of course it's always good to improve your coding skills, I learn a lot from WebmasterWorld!

[aniketrk]

@milosevic
Thanks for your replies and suggestions.
Yes, I think I will be on webmasterWorld a lot now to learn new techniques.
Thanks again,
aniketrk