Hi... I'm new here...

But after reading a few threads it seems like you guys really know what's up with web design theory and practice =)

Could you guys take a look at my layout and give me a few pointers? Thanks...

-Jerry

i like it. it looks really soothing. the steely blues and grays are really cool and relaxing. the 'stone' feels quiet and meditative. the symbol and the font are perfect for this design. its simple, understated and very effective.

this is what i mean when i talk about creating a mood

well done.

oh yeah...

you should add widths and heights to your images

hehe thanks.... that was the effect I was going for... =)

someone else on another forum told me that I should add widths and heights to my images as well, but I don't quite understand why? I thought that having them in my cells would be enough? What does that actually do for the layout? Thanks =)

I agree with Charm.

Reasons for adding height and width to images...

For one thing it's just proper HTML markup.

For another, because the browser has no idea how big the pictures will be until it downloads them, it first builds the site with no pictures, then as they download, it puts them in there, then some more come in, so it throws them in somewhere.... etc. Basically making it look like your site is being built before your eyes. When I loaded your page, it was jumping all over the screen frantically trying to assemble itself. If you used height and width, it would already know where the pictures were going, and how big they are, so it wouldn't do that. It would set all the sizes, and then just fill in the blanks. See?

bingo!

I am not really a big fan of bevals, but sweet, your site looks ok.

omg - i don't like it

I just think it's too square. I dont really like the grey looking bevels and whatnot. Definatly a no-no to not have width and height set on your images though. But as I can see you have fixed that.

I dont really know if you can have a site that is "too square" or not. But to me it just looks like you drew a couple rectangles, filled them, beveled them...added noise and motion blur and cut them up.

As a new part of my critiques I am going to be including either HTML Validation or CSS Validation or both.

HTML Validation :

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.jerrylin.net%2Freflections%2F&doctype=Inline

You might think about using some CSS to set your font faces, sizes and colors. In your HTML, there aren't even any <.font> tags to declare any font-face.

Decta, could you be more specific as to what exactly you don't like about it?

Axiom, regarding the HTML validator, what exactly does it do? And I was not aware that you're supposed to close img tags, as it reported the lack of the img closing tag as a an error... and I'm still learning about the design principles behind fonts, so I just left it default for now...

Actually I used texture fill from a piece of brushed aluminum that I scanned... but yeah I learned afterwards that you can use motion blur to get the same effect...

I guess I'll respond to some of the criticisms... I'd say this is only my 2nd real attempt at a layout and my first one using such a complicated slice and dice... my first one was really a table with a navigation menu next to a body box really, all on the same background, so it looked like the menu was just hanging out there... so I wanted to have more of a bounded look so it'd look more organized... but I didn't wanna use a php-nuke type of look... I mean that's just a bunch of tables with different colored cells, kinda un-inspiring... and while the techno-cyberpunk look is really cool, it's getting to be way overused... (that and my photoshop skills are nowhere near that level yet =P) and plus a lot of those feature a rigid layout and use scroll boxes to display the content which I didn't really like... it's like the content takes second seat to the layout, and I don't think that's a good design principle...

So what I really wanted was to try something different... an elegant look that complements the content instead of taking it over, something that says me, cause yeah I'm a geek but I'm also an artist and I wanted the site to reflect that... hence the boxes were meant to resemble slabs of polished stone like marble but not so heavily streaked that it makes the text hard to read... they're also bit bland so I could tile them without too much contrast showing up between the different images and because I wanted the text to be readable on top of it... beveled because I wanted to give the feeling of depth and texture...

Also, my idea was that if I could reuse a lot of elements and reduce the amount that has to be downloaded, the page would load faster... was this assumption correct? if you open the code up in say Dreamweaver and view it in layout mode you'll see that I reuse a lot of the same elements to optimize load time... I think there are a total of 69 img src tags which load 30 images totalling about 60kb... (the 6 rollover images are precached using jscript) and I'm not done with optimizations yet... but I'm not sure how network latency plays into page load time when there are that many files it has to process through... if anyone has more insight on this I'd appreciate it...

Yeah, it doesn't look like it'd take a long time, but then I've only used photoshop for about 4 months and it's my first slice and dice... =) what took the longest was getting all the sizes of sliced and diced images right and figuring out how to make the code cross-browser compatible... I hate how netscape and ie differ in the way they present tables...

Anyways, thanks all for the feedback...