Need a little help

[nyjet88]

I have two mock-ups, very similar.

http://www.riemendesign.com/NEW/webdesign.html

http://www.riemendesign.com/NEW/webdesign3.html

There is still more I can do to each one, I know...but if you could let me know which one you think is better so far, I would appreciate it.

Thank you.

[Vicious]

i really like the second one. it looks a lot less flat than the first, which looks almost a bit amature imo. i really like the watermark at the bottom of the second one, and i think you could even make it bigger, or extend it up into the site a bit more. i also like how the menu on the side of the second one has a nicer font, but i think you could go with maybe more of an elegant font to match the watermark. you could prolly make the WEB DESIGN font yellow as well to match your wordmark in the top left. looks really good.

[gordie_delini]

i made this mistake myself, and have since remedied (or will remedy) with my personal design work - you're not an us, you're a you - so my suggestion is to get rid of an "about" section, and just have your résumé with a printable version available for download. Make your "contact us " just "contact" and lump your portfolio categories into one category: portfolio. Make those sections sub sections within portfolio.

Another suggestion is when building your portfolio, go for quality, not quantity. People I've come to find would rather see one great design rather than ten kind of "it's nice, but doesn't do anything for me" designs.

As far as your design goes, it's clean but it doesn't wow me. The second one is definitely better. Why have a contact section if you have your contact info constantly in the top right corner? get rid of that, or get rid of the contact section. My suggestion to you would be to play around with the interface. Spend some time looking at design websites and see how they handle UI. There's a lot of really creative stuff out there, and you could do some cool things.

[nyjet88]

Thanks! Ill post a new one later today. Those comments are really helpful. I like your ideas gordie a lot as far as the links go.

[oddball]

I'd drop the grey line that goes down the left side of the page. If you want to show that the main frame is different than the frame you have your links on, what you probably should do is take that design and rotate it 90 degrees and put it on the side. It'll be a nice subtle way to keep uniformity of the two frames when the main frame changes. It'll also break up that huge white space you have.

[SDX]

Definitely the second one.