[raymir]

Hi everyone.. first of all I am new to this site and so far I love the way people here jump to help.. anyways, I designed a website for my brother in law's business... He wanted something simple and nice.. this is what I did..

louiespizzeria . net

he loves it... but I would like to get reviews from people that build websites... and don't worry I'm not like those people that can't take criticism.... so please be honest, tell me what you think and how you think I can make it better... also I have that comments page and contact form.. how can I stop spammers from emailing me and posting stuff?? thanks in advance...

[Hunch]

Well...

If he loves it that's great. If it was a professional job, you would probably be fired , but that's not really the point here.

Personally I'm not sure there's a lot that people can really teach you in a few sentences other than suggest going to design classes. That's not meant to be mean, it's just that there aren't that many 'tweaks' that could change it from its current state into something that a pro-designer would be proud of. I'll save you a verbal beating though, because you seem like a decent enough guy who isn't making any big claims about what you can do.

I'd certainly lose the scrolling text - it's rather dated (scrollers were popular in the mid-late 90s).

But on the whole, it does it's job. It works, gives the information that's required, is pretty straightforward to use, and it doesn't appear (at least in Safari 3.0/Mac OS X) to have any wildly broken pages. Visually it's a fairly normal amateur hobbyist site, which is what you would probably expect -but (and this is probably the most important thing) it wouldn't stop me from ordering one of your brother's pizzas either.

As far as stopping spammers, one way would be to use something called a CAPTCHA (link) which will stop the majority of spambots from posting rubbish.

[Zygote76]

Yes, I would lose the scrolling text. There is a lot to be done to fix the site up, but I think there are a few things you can do to clean it up a bit.

Tone down the drop shadows. They are extremely over done. Try these settings:
Opacity: 40% May have to bump this number up a bit as the background is dark
Distance: 3
Spread: 0 to 3
Size: 3

Lose the bevel/emboss on the white background. It looks as if the settings are max and looks bad. The drop shadow should give you the separation that you seem to be looking for.

Fix the Header. The graphics seem pixelated. Know the size of your header and create the artwork for it. Resize images properly. Always size down and never size up, unless you are working with a vector based program and vectors.

These are a couple of things that might clean it up a bit. If you are interested in learning more about web design start here and google all the tutorials you can on CSS HTML & Photoshop.

Best of Luck