Little commission job

Hey guys, my brother works at a company that sells mortgages and they pretty much wanted a new website for their ITIN loan department. Now i have no experience making professional looking website or websites in general, the only one i've ever really made is my own. Plus i'm the worst when it comes to graphic design. That being said lol......

http://www.iamfantastic.net/linkone/index.html

Take a look at it.. tell me what you hate, tell me what you like.

It's not exactly finished yet. Most of the content on there right now is temporary until i get the final text from the boss guy. So far he seems to like the design, but then again he liked my other design which was absolutely crap lol.

Oh yeah, and i'm having a little problem with it that maybe someone knows how to fix. In IE there's a white bar on the right side of my iframe. This happens i think because the requirements page needs a scroll bar within the iframe. Does anyone know how to get rid of the white bar on the other pages?

i like it. Simple, easy, clean... feels a little bit like a pre-made template, but i think that's fine for this. If it was a creative industry company, I'd say figure out something more fun and styled, but for a loan company, I think it's great.

Not sure how to fix the white bar problem, iframes are and have always been buggy as hell in IE.

That said, here are some crits for ya.

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Your overall layout is fine, simple and easy to figure out, but there are some things within the elements that need some work.

Header:
The drop shadow on the lettering is screaming n00b right now. =P A soft drop shadow with a 1 or 2 pixel distance is pretty much the default setting, so even if it seems to fit it will always make your work look very amateur. For that particular instance I would suggest a very hard shadow with only a 1 pixel distance. Another option is 0 pixel distance with 5 or 6 pixel size shadow.

The stroke color you are using seems to have a low opacity or is just a light color. In my personal opinion that's never a good idea because it makes the text blend in with the background color too much and makes it difficult to read. In my experience with that color you could try a very dark gray (but not quite black) stroke and a 000 black shadow and it should pop it out a bit more and make it easier to read.

The other thing with the text, which applies to the text on the navigation buttons as well is the anti-aliasing. In almost every case I've ever seen, using AA on text on a site is a bad idea. You want the text to be crisp, clear and easy to read, and AA blurs it and does the opposite. In photoshop you can usually turn it to Strong, Smooth, Crisp, or None. 99% of the time for buttons and titles I choose none and use layer effects to get in deep and make it look exactly how I want.

You spelled Contact wrong in your button =P

If you want the edges to fade from brown to white you need to alter the gradient or just make them bigger because they don't fade all the way to white at the moment, and stop at a light brown. Looks a little odd.

If you look at the iframe content in IE then FF you'll notice some major differences.

Lastly, the layout of the text on the different pages is largely inconsistent. An easy fix that would boost the professionalism would just be to make each page have the same font and size, or at least a general theme throughout. Right now you've got some of them as 12px Verdana and others are 14px Verdana while yet another is bold and then you have one in Times New Roman. Stuff like that is easy to fix =)

Nice work man, websites are easy to make...but proper sites that are done well and 100% finished are a lot harder. With a little more polish this one will turn out nice.

thanks a ton for the comments, and yeah, if it looks noobish, it's because it is noobish. I took your advice and changed things a bit. Kept the font style on every page the same and changed the buttons.

Old:
http://www.iamfantastic.net/linkone1/index.html

New:
http://www.iamfantastic.net/linkone/index.html

Looking a bit better, still some things you could play with more. From here on out it's just suggestions, small things that I would change if it were me.

For the text on the buttons, the font itself looks better but you need to figure out something better for the rollover. Right now in FF when you rollover it just shows nothing. I bet if you left it the color it is now but had it turn to black when you rolled over it would look really nice.

For the content inside the iFrame, you might want to add a title to each of them so it's easy to see which page you are on. The Income Requirements has a nice big title but the others don't.

The logo in the header looks really nice now, but the text up there is still bothering me. It's either the stroke color, or the font itself. It just looks too pixelated. That might be my fault for suggesting you remove the anti-aliasing. There are certain fonts that will just never look nice in certain situations, and this could be one of them. If it were me I'd try to find another font that has a similar look but doesn't look pixelated like that with that shadow/stroke combination. You can always spend a few minutes at http://www.dafont.com to find something that works well.

That's about it, good luck with it. =)

I fixed the white bar problem! Apparently it behaves better when you define the height inside the <table> rather than the <td>. Why does it matter?.. beats me!