I've made a couple sites. Feel free to visit the ones you wish to enter: Infrosoft is my personal software site. OS Advocacy is a site dedicated to stop OS zealotry. Completely automated by Coranto and Yabb. Something Bad is a clone of something awful's forums for people who don't want to pay for SA membership. I'll tell you now this is the worst one. So, what do you think of my "portfolio" of sites?

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Hmmm. to be honest, as a web designer, I find your designs redundant and dull. Mostly because your sites are entirely code based with no images. Adding some nifty graphics using Photoshop would add some ZAP to your site and they will look more attractive .

Also, the logo on "something bad" site looks pretty MSPAINTish (I'm guessing it was made in MS paint).

I HIGHLY RECOMMEND the use of Adobe Photoshop or Adobe/Macromedia Fireworks. This will improve the look of the sites you create(d)

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I agree with Paul, all those sites are rather bland looking. If you expect visitors to your sites to be looking purely for content then this approach *might* work. However, another site with similar content but a more appealing look is sure to attract more visitors. Perhaps you made these site with the idea of them being Pocket PC friendly, not sure if they are but they look like they might be, if so, I guess the design is ok. But from a pure web browsing point of view, I think the sites lack appeal and thus the ability to keep people coming back to them.

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When I worked on a design for PTKFGS(failed idea for parody of YTMND) I used images heavily. However, that design is lost, and looks worse than my XHTML only sites. Sites I made expirimenting and applying images were appauling.

That was actually for sarcasm. I could have made it ton's better.

I actually have Fireworks. OS Advocacy's and Infrosoft's logo was made via fireworks.

They aren't meant for PocketPC. OS Advocacy's fixed length design wouldn't even let it fit onto the PocketPC screen. I get a few visitors for each site - infrosoft has a small amount of recurring visitors - around 21 according to the qbtop50 counter.

With the exception of Something Bad, OS Advocacy and Infrosoft are more about the content and are meant for more intelligent visitors. According to a poll on one of my sites it's better than the old graphical Mkportal I used before. If you look at Phatcode, you'll see it's pretty bland, but its content and active forums make it have a decent amount of hits(look at the bottom right corner of the page).

I'll see what I can do with your suggestion, but I don't know how much I can do with Infrosoft, but I can do tons with OS Advocacy.

 

 

 

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