Critique the website please

[elementis0]

Hello everybody, I am making this thread because id like some critiques on my websites re-design before I launch it. I am a new and aspiring web designer/developer(mostly developer) who is looking to get into the website creation market.
My current portfolio website looked tacky and I disliked it so a created a new layout with new contents.

I am still currently writing up content for the homepage and about page and have not even start programming any of the functionality of the client center yet. (that part will take me a few months).
Im pretty much done with the portfolio, contact, pricing and services page.

This is not yet really a full fledged company, just one in the making. I am still working on finding a good designer, technical writer etc...

but id like the people on these forums to critique everything about the website from the layout to the content. functionality cant really be critiqued yet since I have not started it yet.

here's the URL to my redesign

http://www.ocustruct.com/NEWocustruct

Id really love to hear what you guys have to say!

[abduraooft]

I like the design and colors, though I believe you've some divitis, especially in the header portion. I don't see any point in cutting your main header into parts and displaying them as background images of some divs. By doing this, your logo and title lose it's semantics.
I'd recommend to place your logo and/or title using img tag(s)

There is no <title>, for your pages, which is very bad in SEO point of view.
Again, never use tables to build your form, see how to make an accessible form.

The left-border of your right-column is not touching the footer. If the height of your left-column would be always(in all pages) bigger than your right-column, the your could apply a right-border for your left-column instead. Otherwise, you may have to use a faux -column technique (Assuming, you wanna stretch that border to touch your footer )

[elementis0]

Thank you for the feedback abdura, and yes i do admit I do have a bad case of divitis, have actually been aware of that for a bit. I will work on the semantics and validated mark-up after content is written. I do like that article about accessible forms though I shall read up on it.

and ive actually used faux columns before in creating a clan website for a friend, but its not a technique ill need. I think ill just add a right border to the left column. much much easier, i never really though it bad design to have the border not touching the bottom of the page.

and im very aware of not having a title tag haha, that'll come soon haha trust me. as well as a good .ico in the url bar.
keep the comments coming!

[Apostropartheid]

Please, dear Lord, stop saving your background images as JPEGs. JPEGs are a lossy compression format, so the images look bad quality and result in blurriness and compression artifacts around straight edges. Save it as a PNG-8 to preserve those sharp lines.

[elementis0]

Ok all images been converted to pngs. And it does look a lot nicer, plus i saved about 80kb! Thank you very much for the suggestion to change that.
Although I kinda wish you could have focused on some positives too...

equally as important as knowing what is wrong with the site is knowing what im doing right as well. For then I can key into those right habits.

[Apostropartheid]

Originally Posted by elementis0

Ok all images been converted to pngs. And it does look a lot nicer, plus i saved about 80kb! Thank you very much for the suggestion to change that.
Although I kinda wish you could have focused on some positives too...

equally as important as knowing what is wrong with the site is knowing what im doing right as well. For then I can key into those right habits.

Oh, don't be silly: I'm a critic, not an evil overlord (that's Spookster's job). There are a few things I like about this site, like the fairly hard-to-pull-off color scheme and the choice of background.

A couple of extra things:
- The layout would look a lot better if it were centred on my screen, which is fairly wide.
- Verdana looks a bit twisted at 14px. I tried at 12px with a leading of 1.6 and it looks a lot better; its strokes are more solid, too.
- Your header image doesn't link back to your main page, which is accepted practice. Could you do this?
- Your footer is set in Helvetica? The rest of your site is in Verdana, so I'm confused as to why this is.
- It's bad practice to use "click here" as link text.

[elementis0]

Okay well I wrote everything for the site and its now fully functional.
I made the forms web accessible, and i also made them with ajax validation, but they also work fine without JS.

All I need to do now is work on validation.
but I would still love any comments and suggestions you guys have!

the website can now be found here:
http://www.ocustruct.com