Laughing Inc

[Peter L]

It's good for a first attempt, but if I were to CnC this from the perspective of someone that's visiting the site, my first thought would be that it looks very old school HTML. The layout is very basic, with the nav to the left and all of the content running through the middle, but also the colours look very bland and the logo needs a lot of work.

I think you need to get the structure of your template nailed before anything else. Firstly think about what you actually need on the site.. I.E.The navigation, header, main content area, footer. Literally draw out on a bit of paper where each of the sections will be before jumping into Photoshop.

I'm going to use my site here as an example (http://www.fragma.me) even though it's not brilliant, but as you can see, it's organized to a certain extent, and it's simple like yours, but not too bland/boring to look at (I hope lol).
I split mine into 3 sections.
The header
The navigation
The content
Yours at the minute only consists of the content, as the navigation area doesn't feel like it's got it's own section, with it floating to the side. So I'd recommend just building up a nicer template to begin with, and once you've done that, think about the colour scheme. I'd recommend for a basic website like yours to just stick to 3 or 4 colours max. You can use http://kuler.adobe.com/ to look for some good complementary colours.

Try and keep everything professional, and make sure absolutely everything works well together, from the fonts to the colours, to the template, and to how a user can navigate around the site.

Yes, it does look very old school. The bland colors give it that feeling (they are all one color, not a gradient) so that is why.

I did draw the design, then I made it in Photoshop. In Photoshop it looked really nice, but when I convert it to html/css I forfeit a lot of the extra things I added because I simply don't know how to do it properly and it screws the rest up. I had gradients, extra backgrounds to contrast the colors, the navbar looked really nice, etc but I suppose overtime I'll learn how to do those things.

Thanks for the informative reply.