Umm...where to start?
Quote:
Originally Posted by ceece
Check out this website: Welcome to The Oasis Church --- Now that's a very good looking website. I love that blue water at the top. I may contact that church and see if they'll share it for a banner background for me. I'd think it could be found as a simple gif. Would anyone know a good place to look besides google images?
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OK, the Oasis church site is built entirely in Flash which is why the animated banner looks so "watery". It's unlikely you could get a GIF with that sort of quality, and even if you did it would be huge, which would impact on the page load time of your site. Another point that springs to mind immediately is that the Oasis site does not offer a HTML alternative. Some visitors choose not to enable Flash in their browsers, while others may be using browsers where Flash has been disabled by a sys admin (as our Internet Explorers are where I work), so if you produce a Flash-only site you run the risk of losing potential visitors/customers.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ceece
the backgr and temp page i went with is at: Joy Christian Center Church ... looks very simpleton, i know. I'm just not that creative. If I do enough and get good at this, maybe I can get paid!
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To be brutally honest, what you have on your site so far - although there is nothing wrong with it
technically - does look a little crude and amateurish. The thing that a lot of people don't seem to appreciate is that creating a good and effective website comes down to two specifics:
- Good coding
- Good graphic design
A website
can function with just one of these, but to really impress, you definitely need both. While coding skills can be learnt from books and tutorials, graphic design principles are a bit more "nebulous" - and (like most notions of a "creative" aspect) can vary from person to person. I know of a few sites that try to put across good design ideas (Vincent Flanders's excellent
Web Pages That Suck for example), but by and large it's a case of learning by experience and analysing other sites that impress you.
However, all is not lost: you've come to the right place for good advice and I'm sure one or more of our resident web gurus will be able to give you more help on all aspects of good coding/design.