Critique of a site for Ronald J Treitner
Has anyone actually given you an honest critique of his work? I'd hate to come over like Simon Cowell, but you just isn't up to being a web designer.
I'm struggling to find *any* redeeming features in his sites. There is NO design, just various elements badly thrown around in Dreamweaver's design mode.
You have made no consideration to typography, layout, scale, colour or different browsing environments. It looks like something a 15 year old kid would have done back in 1998.
Don't be duped by 'awards' such as those given by the American Association of Webmasters. They are essentially worthless and usually intended to lull you into subscribing to an equally pointless annual membership. Being included in a list of reader sites in Practical Web Design hardly constitutes a seal of approval in the industry either - even now .net puts some crap in its monthly section - lazy copy and paste hackery at its worst.
You seem to be either completely deluded about your supposed 'skills', or you are trying to get business by deception. Take this, for example:
| Quote: |
| My sites actually validate, which means they contain no errors. Many other web design sites out there can't even get their sites to validate and that's a skill any beginner web designer should know, let alone any site claiming to be a full service expert. If they haven't mastered the basic skills that will benefit you, how good are they really? |
It's a typical view of someone who reads too many web sites but fails to grasp the fundamental needs of the customer. Validating code can be a good way to spot glaring errors you may have found, but it's no guarantee of a well-coded document. Your code is full of extraneous divs and spans and styles with no semantic structure. By all means preach standards, but at least get it right.
Your sites fail to offer *anything* to benefit the customer. In fact, I would expect businesses who use your services to suffer - their brand will be damaged rather than enhanced.
Even putting aside your lack of design and coding skills, it doesn't look like you've got what it takes. You went into web design to escape the low salaries of the security sector, yet are offering to do sites fo $320? Most professionals would be charging that for half a days work, not an entire site (search for posts I've made for my views on low rates). Your laziness or just lack of awareness has led to sites in your portfolio having titles of 'Untitled Document'; you have little appreciation of grammar usage (what's with the asterisks instead of bullet points?) and your copy is dull and lacking definition and structure. There's nothing there which would make me want to use your services.
My advice is to either reconsider your career path (web design isn't the easy-money goldmine you think it might be) or learn the fundamentals of
design rather than the worthless college courses which teach you how to create a web site using word processing techniques.
