Welcome!

[Pixel Peony]

I'm not a master at CSS, so while I know what I wanted to do with my portfolio, I'm not always sure how to implement it. That being said, I am going through another redesign process and I'd really like to know what people think. http://www.pixelpeony.com

Thank you in advance for any suggestions or feedback you have to offer.

[Andy]

I love it.

There's a few things I noticed that you could correct, though:

• Navigation menu items do not have even paddings around them.
• Mail address in the upper right corner is too small to be unreadable.
• You lack an xml:lang attribute on your html tag.
• Your home page has a closing anchor tag (</a>) on the "home" item in the navigation menu but no opening tag.
• Your portfolio, process and contact pages has script tags outside the head and body tags, which is not allowed.
• Your portfolio page has a 404 error on fancybox.css.
• Your about page lacks a h1 heading.
• You are incorrectly using headings by stuffing it with content. Headings should introduce content, not contain it. E g. "Home", "Portfolio", "About".
• The content of the h1 heading should be reflected in the title. If, for example, you are on the portfolio page, your title should say "Portfolio - Pixel Peony Design".
• Navigation menu should be preceded by a heading, preferably an h2.
• Sub-headings following the <h1> needs to be properly nested. E g. "h2" needs to be after "h1", "h3" needs to be after "h2" and so on.
• blockquote text should be wrapped in a paragraph tag (<p>).
• Your quote from Abigail Kurtz is not wrapped in a <blockquote> tag.
• Don't use <br/> to introduce margins. Use the margin CSS property and leave <br/> to break up text instead.
• Don't name IDs and classes according to how they look, but rather what they contain. "rightcol" might not be to the right in a future iteration of your website.
• To clear floats, use overflow: hidden; on the container instead. Introducing markup to clear the floats is a dirty technique at best and FnE (float-nearly-everything) has been criticised for creating more problems than it solves.
• Your "Return to top" link should not be part of the content paragraph.
• You needn't introduce a named anchor in order to link back to the top of the page as IDs double as fragment identifiers as-well. You could use your #wrapper div for that.
• Doing the above, I see little reason to keep the Transitional doctype. You could switch over to Strict.

And that would conclude my brief review

[Pixel Peony]

Andy,

Thank you so much for your detailed input. This has been a real learning experience and I will implement all of your suggestions. The CSS needed cleaning up anyway.

Much appreciated,
Jessica

[bigsmile]

I really like the look of the site - It is very clean and elegant, but the use of cyan coloured quotes and the magenta logo give it a fun and modern flare.

The only weakness is that it is perhaps a bit too wordy. On the front page, for example, you have to scroll down quite a bit to see your recent work, when really that sort of information should be instantly accessible.

I would perhaps consider using devices such as lists to trim down the words, while still retaining the content. For example, the quote on the front page is too long - it might work better if it was shorter, and then a link was given to read the full quote.

[Emmenworkz]

I don't like the popping effect on menu, it looks like it isn't styled correctly. But maybe you can solve that by implementing some simple jquery animations (with a bounce effect or something). But the design looks great! simple and minimalistic. well done!

[Pixel Peony]

Thanks to everyone for your positive and constructive feedback! It's really helpful. I'm not sure why the nav. menu is "popping". I'll have to look into that further. I agree that it needs editing. My initial goal was to get it up and running so I could see what needed to be refined.It will take me a little while to finish the redesign, but I'll throw it up here when I'm done. Thanks again.