this is my first ever website design and i want it to be good for my church department.

Please kindly tell me what i did wrong,what to do to improve it and more ideas, i will really appreciate it.


http://dbstudio.110mb.com/cles/index.html

http://dbstudio.110mb.com/cles/contact.html

let me know what you guys think


thanks guys,

If this is your first, then I must say you have done better than expected, at least from my perspective. You might want to look into the following, moving forward:

1) On contact form, you don't indicate which fields are required (using a red asterisk is common practice). I would also place those 2 closer to each other since they are the only 2 required on your form.

2) Consistency: b/w the home page and contact page, the backgrounds don't match.

3) I assume the calendar is/will be there to indicate what day it is and perhaps what days an event is scheduled. Right now, it is just a bland calender. To avoid reinventing the wheel, i would suggest google calendar which you can customize to meet your needs. In other words, there is no need for a calendar and "latest updates". It should be one or the other.

4) Is this line generated dynamically? <!-- #BeginDate format:Am1 -->March 8, 2008<!-- #EndDate -->
If so, the date is off by a day. You might also want to look into using javascript as that will display the date based on the client's browser as opposed to the server. In other words, if your ISP is in the US, the server's time would be GMT-6 which would display the wrong date for Nigerian visitors.

5) Why is there an L-shaped white line running through the photo of the pastor?

Finally, as a side comment, tell whoever did Faith's site to takeover the church's main site as her site is way better looking.

I hope these help.

A2J,

Pls correct the spellings words on that site.

You heard

if this is ur first site, then you are killing me

keep it up
first, I kinda like the L shape on the pastor's pix as opposed to my2cents

"canaanland environmental squad" at the top
the colour is closer to the background and not easy on the eyes, using drop shadow might help or you use a darker colour

thanks guys for the comments, i truely appreciate them and i have take note of all

@my2cents

1.would you give me a link to the google calendar so i can use it?

2. yeah, the link <!-- #BeginDate format:Am1 -->March 8, 2008<!-- #EndDate --> is what is generated when i use dreamweaver 8 insert date option but it doesnt really do what i intend which is to change the time to the clients computer time every time they visit but it just changes to my own last updated time, you have any remedy for this?

3. I source the picture from other canaanland websites and the L shape came with the picture.

@a--point

Thanks but am not yet to deloy the website, i will check for every spelling errors when due.

@webdezzi

Thanks for the comment too, am really new to dreamweaver 8 and photoshop cs2,so i dont know how to do the drop down stuff yet, maybe i will ask my photoshop mentor on nairaland to help me out with that.


I really appreciate you guys comments, but do you think this website is okay enough to serve as a portfolio for my web design business?

1) Log on to your google account. In the top left, there should be a "more" link. select Calendar. Create a calendar. Set up your events then, I forget which page, but there is one that provides a link to the xml URL of your calendar. Copy that and save it to your clipboard

2) Visit http://gmodules.com/ig/creator?synd=open&url=http%3A//www.google.com/ig/modules/calendar-for-your-site.xml&pt=%26context%3Dd%26synd%3Dopen%26lang%3Den%26.lang%3Den%26country%3Dus%26.country%3Dus%26cat%3Dall%26num%3D1%26start%3D-1%26cols%3D1%26objs%3D6aZ&sn=6aZ&lang=en

Note that you can customize the look and feel. I think there is a greenish border calendar that may match your site. Whatever the case may be, customize as necessary. On the right half of that page is a bunch of textboxes. Again, customize as necessary. The one to look out for I think (sorry, I haven't done this in a while. Then again, if you don't make mistakes, you won't learn ) is "calendar 1 URL". Paste in the link of your calendar's XML in that space and preview. Then get the code for that calendar and paste on your page

3) This is what I have used for my client-side date display and it hasn't failed so far:
a) Create a .js file and paste this code in there:

function myDateFormat(dt){
  var  dayno    =  dt.getDate() ;
  var  monthno  =  dt.getMonth() ;
  var  yearno   =  dt.getFullYear() ;
  
  var  daystr ;
  if       ((dayno == 1) 
            || 
            (dayno == 21)     
            || 
            (dayno == 31)
            )
            {daystr  =  dayno + "st"}
  else  if  ((dayno == 2)
             ||
             (dayno == 22)
            )
            {daystr  =  dayno + "nd"}  
  else  if  ((dayno == 3)
             ||
             (dayno == 23)
            )
            {daystr  =  dayno + "rd"}
  else      {daystr  =  dayno + "th"}
  
  if        (monthno ==  0)  {monthstr  =  "January"}
  else  if  (monthno ==  1)  {monthstr  =  "February"}
  else  if  (monthno ==  2)  {monthstr  =  "March"}
  else  if  (monthno ==  3)  {monthstr  =  "April"}
  else  if  (monthno ==  4)  {monthstr  =  "May"}
  else  if  (monthno ==  5)  {monthstr  =  "June"}
  else  if  (monthno ==  6)  {monthstr  =  "July"}
  else  if  (monthno ==  7)  {monthstr  =  "August"}
  else  if  (monthno ==    {monthstr  =  "September"}
  else  if  (monthno ==  9)  {monthstr  =  "October"}
  else  if  (monthno == 10)  {monthstr  =  "November"}
  else  if  (monthno == 11)  {monthstr  =  "December"}    

  var dtstr  =  daystr + " " + monthstr + " " + yearno
  
  return  dtstr
}

b) In the file you want the date displayed on (I actually add the code to the top of my pages so I can call it once from an included header file. That way, I just call it once and if I need to change anything, it happens in one location only. Code reuse at its best ), paste this code there:

<script type="text/javascript">
<!--
var today = new Date() ;
document.write(myDateFormat(today));
// -->
</script>

Style and/or modify the js code as necessary (for example: "today is <display date>" or whatever)

Finally, visit http://www.geocities.com/myibibio/ (my very first web dev side project) and tell me if it is anything compared to what you have. If you say mine is better than yours (and I do have mine as part of my portfolio), then you need your head examined

If as you have said, this is your first job, I'd say you did a very good job. Kudos!