http://lakescot.co.uk/

Please scrutinise. I need as much demoralising honest negative feedback as possible. 

I'm demoralised ;) 

that flash intro needs to go
you can't copy the text in the image - THE FUCKING EMAIL ADDRESS
you need to put in a lot of work tuning your font settings because right now they look shitty
same for list margins/paddings
your lines are totally not lining up to anything -> busy appearance
duplicated menu is so 1998
as is xhtml button 

http://lakescot.co.uk/assets/images/ogglingCow.jpg 

the colors don't exactly scream cow food to me 

megaman and I agree pretty much on everything he said. You really need to work on aligning stuff and using proper margins / paddings to make the entire design look much more harmonic and less busy. 

when the icon zooms out at the end of the loop, you use the low res graphic which pixelizes badly. swap the high res graphic back in before doing the zoom. 

That's a good list ;) 

In my opinion, most of web design is thinking: what information do I want to convey, and how can I do that in the most effective way?

You need to explain as soon as you get to the front page, very simply, what the site is for, and then make it very easy for the user to do that. That's why lots of sites today go for BIG TEXT ONE SENTENCE DESCRIPTION or a big BUY NOW button. That can be overdone, but I hope you take my point - you never want a user sitting there thinking "what do I do now?"

So you need to prioritize the most important things, in this case Services and Products. Although I'd argue that something like Consulting Services is better if that's the only service. Likewise, if those products are going to be sold online, then Products can become Shop. If not online, how do you buy them? It's not very clear. If you contact this dude Jerry, you need his contact info again.

Generally you gotta avoid redundancy, make it clear as possible... so you don't need a Welcome to the Lakeland-Scottish Feeds & Services website. when you know you're on a website and you can see Lakeland-Scottish... at the top.

If you click About it says Our website has been designed to be mouse-freindly. Just click on the desired link opposite. ... so there's a page you can remove, it just told me how to use a menu I already used.

I would change that vertical menu to horizontal, because horizontal menus read much better for short lists of items. Make the list as short as possible: Home, Services, Products, Contact? The News section can go on the front page, as can links if it's really necessary. 

everything Megaman said is correct 

Thanks.

I'm gonna submit the site for marking fairly imminently, but advice like "less over-done flash content" and making the formatting so it's easier to read by breaking it up is all good honest advice. If it were entirely up to me i would have changed some of the colours in the logo too, but apparently I'm not allowed to do that.

The entire last paragraph you wrote Starbuck is also very very true.

Unfortunately the brief I was given was that I had to use loads of columns, otherwise I would have made the whole site narrower too, and had the menu at the top.

I think the tutor is happy with it, so I will prob take a load of the stuff out of it (for the sake of Lakeland Scot. F.S.) after I have submitted it and recieved whatever grading they give me. The course is Dreamweaver/Flash, so I need the flash stuff in there atm. 

Yippee!!! Happy days.

I can take some of the flash out now. And tweak the margins from the CSS fairly easily too.....

Thanks for all suggestions :) 

If a website has a flash intro, or is completely dependent on it (flash), it's not worth visiting. 

I think it depends on the purpose of the website.

I mean for a static bulletin then why not?

If everytime I logged into google or facebook (or func) I had to endure a 'flash-intro' then yeah - that would suck.

TBH I was very disappointed with the amount of Actionscript that was in the course. Practically none :(

The idea of coding games in Flash was appealing to me. Guess I can find a couple of youtube videos for it though.... 

jt_++

Flash is the wrong tool for the job 90% of the time. There are very few cases where the use of flash is justified. 

It depends what the job is.

Flash has some great uses, otherwise it wouldn't be so prevalent. 

90% of the time if an add doesn't have flash in it then it's not a real add. 

Flashpunk seems like a good starting point with a fair amount of getting started videos.

Html5 and javascript is probably the way things are moving though... 

If it didn't suck so much. Even on my core i7, with 8gb of ram, flash can heat it up. Not to mention all of the security vulnerabilities that flash has, &c. 

In light of jt_ and SleepwalkR's trolling, but I dont know if it's gonna be easy. I might have to commit suicide for another two wasted years of my life. 

And it has a typo, too: independant!!

"Ruminant Nutritionist" sounds like a good name for map, though. :D 

A cow is a bit like a walking fermentation tank.... 

Naturally 

The flash stuff isn't really necessary for the site, but it's not annoying, either. It may even make it a bit more appealing than how I imagine other sites of this kind/purpose to be. 

I want to learn more about server-side technology, databasing, php, sql, apache?, definitely java, how to spell proper etc...

Just takes time and guidance. I have touble knowing where to start with learning this stuff, but i am understanding bits and bobs as I go along.